SCORP10N BOWL

FOX "News" VP: It's Not News

2011-12-29T21:18:00.000-08:00

Kimberly Guilfoyle, former first lady of San Francisco, arguing that everyone in Berkeley is fabulously wealthy and has too much free time.

Roger Domal, the vice president for eastern ad sales at Fox "News", quoted in the New York Times:

"People know what the news is ... You're not coming to cable news for news anymore. You're coming for either validation of your opinion or you're looking to find out what the other side is saying."

This is the guy in charge of selling Fox's real product -- viewer eyeballs -- to its customers, corporations. He's under no illusion that it's news.

Why is anyone else?

Here's a question for the FCC and the FTC: If the guy in charge of selling the product says that the product is not what it purports to be -- "News" -- then why is this business not being prosecuted for making demonstrably, admittedly false claims about its product?

This ain't a toaster. This is the most important product in a democracy -- valid information about the world. Fox exec admits that's not his company provides.

Even Fox's tag line, "We report, you decide," is false.

No news there.

What is news is that the company's VP admits that the deciding has already been done. The company's VP admits that it is not doing the "report" part -- because that's what "news" is. You could look it up.

Obama had it right in his earlier stance on Fox. He backpedaled under pressure from confused journalists, who seemed to be under the illusion that what Fox does is journalism.

Why are actual journalists so afraid to call Fox what it is -- corporate propaganda that provides "validation of your opinion" billed as "News"?

Why won't they call a fox a fox?

The Times piece is about a show called "The Five" -- which is basically five obnovious people sitting around a table, spouting lines designed to reinforce the opinion that the people who own and program Fox "News" want its viewers to have (or thinks its viewers already have.) See if you can guess what that opinion is.

In this video, "The Five" discuss a Berkeley study that finds that poor people are more compassionate than rich people.

What study? you might ask. Who were the authors? What were the methods for determining the results?

Well, don't look to this nearly nine-minute long discussion for the answers to such questions.

In fact, all the viewer learns is that a Berkeley study finds that poor people are more compassionate than rich people -- it's essentially a factoid from the news crawl, not even a sentence.

But the five panelists use it to anchor a fairly shameless and dishonest assault on:

- Berkeley
- college Professors
- poor people
- liberals

Among the talking points thrown around is that "people in Berkeley" are "excruciatingly wealthy". This is parroted around the table -- including by Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ex-underpants model ex-wife of San Francisco's former mayor, Gavin Newsom -- who knows damn well that, well, that's an overstatement.

"Can I just tell you? Where you went wrong with this?" says Guilfoyle. "Berkeley! I mean, why are you giving this any credibility whatsoever? I agree with you in your intro, that this is, it's just ridiculous. I mean, this is what they come up with in Berkeley," and here she glances down at her script, "because they have so much money and so much time."

Who in Berkeley, exactly, is the "they" who has "so much money and so much time"? The researchers who did the study? The graduate students?

You see, she is arguing that the host is wasting his time even talking about this study, because it comes from Berkeley. We're never told that it comes from the University of California -- it just comes from "Berkeley", a bunch of hippies on the street, just making this stuff up. Just blowing it out their bongs. And so, like, I mean, why are you giving this any credibility whatsoever?

"I did this story because it practically writes itself," says the host, looking down at his script.

Also among the opinions reinforced by this great new show -- a fitting replacement for Glenn Beck, really, in the stoking fear and loathing time slot -- is that poor people could not be more compassionate than the wealthy, because there is crime in slums. You see, poor people are criminals, and commit crimes against other poor people. Therefore, they could not possibly be more compassionate than wealthy people.

Really.

Hello, FCC. Hello, SEC. Hello, White House. Hello, Senator Franken -- have you got your ears on? This is not news -- it is destructive propaganda, designed to tear this country apart. And in case you hadn't noticed, it's doing a pretty good job of it.

After all, this appears to be how Republicans in government -- and hoping to be in government -- get their information.

Is it any wonder that the Speaker of the House, second in line to the Presidency, thinks that the problem with carbon dioxide is that it causes cancer? Or is a by-product of bovine digestion?

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what is the responsible way? That's my question. What is the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions, which every major scientific organization has said is contributing to climate change?

BOEHNER: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide. And so I think it's clear...

Yet another study has found that viewers of Fox News are not only less informed than the consumers of news from most other sources, they are less informed than consumers of no news at all.

Let me say that again. Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don't follow the news at all.

Fairleigh Dickinson University recently questioned 612 adults in New Jersey about how they get their news, offering as options traditional outlets like newspapers and local and national television news, or blogs, websites and even Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."

They then asked a series of factual questions about the major events of the last year, from the "Arab Spring" to the Republican race for president.

For example, respondents were first asked whether, to the best of their knowledge, opposition groups in Egypt had been successful in bringing down the Mubarak regime.

Among NPR listeners, 68% correctly said they had been; only 49% of Fox News viewers answered correctly. In fact, the survey found, Fox viewers were 18 percentage points less likely to answer correctly than those who watched no news at all.

"The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don't watch any news at all," said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson.

Of course, this all makes sense when you consider that Domal, the FOX VP, sees his network as having neither the responsibility nor the need to present news.

Again:

"People know what the news is ... You're not coming to cable news for news anymore. You're coming for either validation of your opinion or you're looking to find out what the other side is saying."

In other words, FOX doesn't need to inform its viewers. They're already informed. They're not coming here for the news. They already know what the news is.

Unless, of course, they're FOX viewers.

The most worrisome part is that you can count more than half the Congress among those ranks.

I'm not a big fan of most restrictions on first amendment rights.

But if this isn't what the famous test held to be the standard for possibly limiting speech -- falsely shouting "fire!" in a crowded movie theatre -- nothing is. From the famous decision in Schenck v. United States (about the legality of speaking out against war during WWI), written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Of course, this presumes that the Congress is able to discern reality from sophisticated propaganda waged by a multinational media conglomerate whose business is selling its viewers' eyeballs -- members of Congress or not -- to other corporations.

And that they would recognize a clear and present danger to the nation's security when they saw one on TV.

(Revised 12/31, from an earlier version)

Abramoff: Campaign Contributions = Bribery

2011-11-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

You can take it with a grain of salt -- convicted influence-peddler Jack Abramoff, who greased the wheels of Republican government with cash during the Bush years, is trying to rehabilitate himself.

But he's certainly telling the truth when he says:

What I did not consider then, and never considered until I was sitting in prison, was that contributions from parties with an interest in legislation are really nothing but bribes. Sure, it's legal for the most part. Sure, everyone in Washington does it. Sure, it's the way the system works. It's one of Washington's dirty little secrets - but it's bribery just the same.

Campaign contributions are the root of all evil in our system of government. Why did the economy collapse? Because creeps like former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine spent money and influence to get rid of all the rules.

Why is our healthcare system still a catastrophe? Because the insurance industry bought enough politicians to take the teeth out of reform.

Why are we blindly destroying our planet's ability to sustain life in the form to which we are accustomed, and in which our species evolved? Because the energy industry corporations have virtually unlimited money to spend buying politicians who then force the taxpayers to bear the cost of their doing business ... with cancers, emphysemas, polluted waterways and groundwater that cost billions to clean up -- and our atmosphere, whose ability to remove excess carbon and bury it in rocks and oceans is now grievously broken.

Even the White House is up for grabs -- Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute bought themselves ten years of a do-nothing policy on global warming, the denationalization of Iraqi oil, and the biggest profits in the history of money. Goldman and Sachs appear to have bought themselves control of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

It's so egregious and so openly accepted now that Koch Industries -- a conglomerate whose entire business model is based on exploiting public resources, and forcing taxpayers to pay for the waste it generates, now have their own candidate, Herman Cain.

When entrenched forces become so powerful that they can prevent a society from acting in its own interest, that society is in existential danger.

Just like stellar matter, power and money accumulate in pockets of gravity. That's the state of nature.

Capitalism, regulated by democracy, allows freedom.

Capitalism unfettered destroys democracy.

It begins with legalized corruption -- and that's where it must end.

Obama Counterinsurgency Needed

2011-09-16T11:25:00.001-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

The entire purpose of the Tea Party was to cripple this country's move to a new energy economy.

The old powers in oil, coal, and even timber (and note that among the biggest Tea Party funders, the Koch Brothers, profit in most of these old-guard sectors of the economy) underwrote this "grass-roots" movement. Fox News essentially created the Tea Party, using the fiery vitriol of Glen Beck -- whose television program debuted the day after Obama's inauguration -- to peddle a false narrative that portrayed Obama's Presidency as an abomination, an assault by the country's enemies on the heart of the nation's fabric, a virus infecting the country's very goodness and soul (all classic arguments used by rising Fascist regimes to gain popular support).

Obama's presidency was not valid. It was a fraud. Obama was not a citizen. He was not a Christian. He hated America. And was a Marxist, a Communist -- he was every possible worst thing you could be to a jingoistic ignorant from the 20th century, every enemy rolled into one: a Soviet Communist Muslim Nigger. And then, too, Beck crafted Obama every night as the return of Hitler.

And so, it was easy. The Tea Party signs, quite predictably, portrayed Obama as an African witch doctor, as Hitler himself, or with hammers and sickles in his O logo, or as bin Laden -- this, before he killed bin Laden.

(no irony here:)

But why would energy interests bankroll the Tea Party -- a loose band of citizens ostensibly angry about government spending and bailouts of "too big to fail" corporations? After all, the Iraq War was essentially a trillion dollar bailout of an oil industry increasingly unable to find new product.

Sixteen days after Obama's Inauguration, Texas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions suggested in an interview that in response to the Democrats' control of the White House and Congress, the GOP should follow the Taliban model of insurgency.

"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."

How did the Taliban -- and the Iraqi insurgency, for that matter -- "disrupt and change a person's entire processes"?

Both insurgent movements did not work to cement actual territorial victories -- instead, they moved to undermine public confidence in a new government's ability to maintain order. The purpose of those violent insurgencies was not to kill people and take territory, but to undermine popular faith in the ability of those in charge -- by sowing as much chaos as possible.

And that is, in fact, what the GOP has done through Obama's entire Presidency.

They have at every turn undermined Obama's attempts to rescue the economy -- and more importantly, to build the next economy.

There could be no more potent symbol than the House Republican leadership's move, immediately upon taking control of Congress after the 2010 elections, to take composting, compostable bioplastic utensils, and paper cups out of the Congressional cafeteria -- and replace them with good old fashioned petroleum plastic and styrofoam cups. It was largely seen as a poke in the eye to Nancy Pelosi. But really, it was a signal to the old guard that the House GOP would kill the green economy in the cradle.

Everyone knows the next economy is in green-tech and clean-tech. That's why the GOP -- funded by oil and coal interests -- (and some Democrats who represent oil and coal states) have worked to kill it.

The big "scandal" this week is about Solyndra, a California solar manufacturer that was the beneficiary of stimulus loans, in part of Obama's effort to kickstart a green tech economy hindered for forty years by extreme Federal subsidization of oil and coal.

Solyndra failed, at a cost of 500 million dollars of taxpayer funds. That's kind of how investment works -- you win some, you lose some. And ideally, in the end, you come out ahead.

But as Thomas Friedman notes in the New York Times, Solyndra may not have failed had the U.S. Senate in 2009 not failed to pass a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions. The inability of Congress to act sends a signal to investors in green tech that they will still have to compete against federally-subsidized oil and coal.

There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce "green jobs," and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal that raises the price of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand for, and sustained private sector investment in, renewables. Without a carbon tax or gasoline tax or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.

As Friedman correctly notes, the green tech industry has been waiting for a "price signal" -- a signal that the Federal Government would no longer keep the price of dirty fossil fuels artificially low relative to next-generation energy technologies.

But that's the whole point.

In 2000, the energy industries saw two candidates with the potential to take the energy economy in vastly different directions -- the global warming guy or the oil industry guy with a hard-on for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Guess who they bankrolled. And Bush's policies followed suit. The Bush Presidency was a disaster for America, and an unmitigated jackpot for the fossil industries.

With Obama's election, the American people saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the country's course. And the best of that was the chance to move away from the old-fashioned energy policies that keep us chained to (as Neil Young would say) the oil monster's hook and claw -- to pollution and catastrophic global warming and wars in oil countries.

The energy industries saw the same thing -- so, flush with Bush-era profits, they doubled down on the GOP. They funded the Tea Party movement. As the Guardian (UK) reported in 2010:

BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama's energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe's biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: "The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people."

Hell, Koch Industries even bused Tea Partiers to anti-climate protests.

They also lay at the heart of a "movement" to counter Obama's moves away from that old-world energy economy -- and to frame it as a Communistic assault on Traditional American Freedoms:

The Koch network meets twice a year to plan and expand its efforts - as the letter says, "to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it."

Those efforts, the letter makes clear, include countering "climate change alarmism and the move to socialized health care," as well as "the regulatory assault on energy," and making donations to higher education and philanthropic organizations to advance the Koch agenda.

...

The goals for the twice-yearly meetings, the brochure says, include attracting more investors to the cause, but also building institutions "to identify, educate and mobilize citizens" and "fashioning the message and building the education channels to re-establish widespread belief in the benefits of a free and prosperous society."

Charles Koch, whose wealth Forbes magazine calculates at about $21.5 billion, argues in his letter that "prosperity is under attack by the current administration and many of our elected officials." He repeatedly warns about the "internal assault" and "unrelenting attacks" on freedom and prosperity. A brochure with the invitation underscores that to the Koch network, "freedom" means freedom from taxes and government regulation. Mr. Koch warns of policies that "threaten to erode our economic freedom and transfer vast sums of money to the state."

And by assaults on freedom and prosperity, the Kochs and their ilk mean assaults on the freedom of oil companies and timber companies to consume public resources without cleaning up their wastes, and the prosperity of ... well, themselves.

Among the keynote speakers at the Kochs' event was FOX's own bizarroworld agitator Glenn Beck. Beck, who cemented the Tea Party itself with his cult-like "9/12 Movement" and won the 2010 election for the GOP, has been moved out of FOX's programming and onto his own network, where he can continue to further the cause without threatening the ruse that FOX is an actual news network, rather than a sophisticated corporate-Republican propaganda outfit aimed at destroying the Obama presidency.

And honestly, when we hear Republicans now bemoaning the government "picking winners and losers", that's the former government-picked winners talking. In other words: Government should not be picking winners and losers, unless the winners is us.

And make no mistake: oil and timber interests are among the resource-hungry industries that benefit the most from federal largesse in the form of subsidies for logging and exploration roads, essentially free use of public forests and lands, and free waste disposal,when the taxpayers clean up the messes they've left behind.

This all feels like repeating old news -- except that this week, the talk has been that Obama's Green Jobs initiative has failed, because it has not, in a mere two years, rescued the economy by generating millions of jobs, becoming 10% of the economy, and thereby erasing unemployment.

Baloney.

Green-tech -- new technologies that move away from toxic petrochemicals and landfills and toward closed-loop waste management -- is the future. Clean energy is the core of the next global economy. Germany knows it, China knows it, Japan knows it, India knows it. The American people have long seen that the future would be a place of solar panels rather than smokestacks.

But the purpose of the modern GOP is to try to prevent the United States form moving forward into the next energy economy. In the long term, of course, they will not succeed -- these are the last dying gasps of the old order.

But the fossil industries' determination to hold onto their dominance of US policy dovetails nicely with the purpose of the Republicans in the Obama Age -- which is, according to the top Republican in the Senate, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- of the coal state, Kentucky, to destroy Obama's presidency. Here's McConnell in October 2010:

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

They're doing a good job of it. Everywhere the republicans could throw chains around the President's neck and bind his wrists -- the health care law, the economic recovery, the stimulus package, the debt ceiling "crisis" -- they have, and have so hindered the nation.

The other side of that coin is that everywhere the President can operate without GOP meddling -- drawing down the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing bin Laden and dismantling al Qaeda, managing the Arab Spring, ousting longtime US foe Moammar Qaddafi, rescuing the auto manufacturers, raising CAFE fuel economy standards, and thereby creating an electric car industry that manufactures in the United States -- he has succeeded.

And now that we have a burgeoning green car industry, here comes the GOP to try to kill it, all in the name of continuing to feed the impression, among both conservatives convinced that Obama is an African-born/Muslim/Nazi/Stalinist/the Antichrist, and among liberals/progressives who now consider Obama to be, in the words of two women friends of mine this week, "a pussy", that Obama is incapable of leading.

This time, the tactic is to kill off Federal loans that are actually working to bring green car manufacturing jobs in the former rust belt, to use to pay for disaster relief from the global warming-exacerbated Hurricane Irene, and from the East Coast earthquake -- in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's home district -- in other words, to sink that money into one-time cleanup and rebuilding efforts, instead of using it to invest in the future.

Essentially the Republicans, led this time by Cantor himself, are insisting we take away a man's fishing rod, and give him a fish sandwich for lunch. That was once the opposite of a "conservative" philosophy. No more:

House Republicans rolled out their plan to fund disaster relief in Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-Va.) district, but at the cost of almost half of remaining loans set aside to help the American auto industry ...

The loans for the auto industry were meant to help encourage new manufacturing plants in the U.S. and re-equip existing facilities, as well as drive the companies toward making more fuel-efficient vehicles ...

One of the direct results was that Ford quit manufacturing their Ford Focus in Mexico.

"All of the Focus production is now here in Michigan," Hill said. "Nissan is building their Leaf in Tennessee. I don't think that program would've happened in the United States if it weren't for this type of money."

For the insurgents, it's a win-win scenario. The fossil industries get the brakes put on the move away from their product. The GOP wins by killing jobs -- and thereby bolstering the impression that Obama is failing to aid the economy.

Sure, Americans will lose their jobs, and the nation will be crippled in its move toward the economy of the future. But Republicans care as much about such collateral damage as the Taliban cares about the lives of innocent Afghans killed in suicide attacks. In fact, collateral damage is the whole point. Because people will pin the deaths not only on the insurgents, but on the government's failure to protect them from the insurgents.

This is the Taliban Insurgency strategy, applied inside the United States.

Taken in perspective, the entire purpose of the Tea Party is to strangle the United States' move into the next energy economy, the Age of Clean, Green Industry.

The purpose of the GOP is to sow chaos, to undermine confidence in Obama's ability to lead.

And, on both counts, they are succeeding.

By handing the House to the GOP, the Tea Party killed the green economic recovery -- at least in the short term. And that looks bad for Obama. At least on the surface.

The bottom line is this:

The American people need to keep things in perspective.

Again, everywhere Obama has been able to act without GOP interference, he has done quite well -- bin Laden, Libya, saving the automakers, raising CAFE standards, drawing down in Iraq and Afghanistan, managing the Arab Spring.

Everywhere it appears that Obama is doing poorly is where the GOP has moved to kill him with their Taliban Insurgency strategy.

Many Americans are losing faith in Obama and considering sitting on their hands in 2012. This is just like the Afghans who refuse to aid U.S. forces in digging out al Qaeda, because they are demoralized by the decade of violence under U.S. occupation. Essentially, they will be handing a victory to the Taliban.

Voters who support or once supported Obama need to buck up -- and, frankly, give Democrats control of the White House and both houses of Congress -- with a filibuster-proof majority.

As Jonathan Chait explains in the New York Times, Obama had this for only four months of his presidency. And for the rest of the time, the Insurgency has filibustered nearly every bill; blocked nearly every nominee; and gummed up the works in every single way they possibly could.

The insurgency must be destroyed. The insurgents must be removed from office.

As for Obama:

He's trying to do two things at once: to change the tenor of a Washington that acts only for partisan advantage, and to actually move the country forward against the will of partisan insurgents.

And really, he's trying to do the same thing at home as he is doing on some level in Afghanistan, which is to negotiate with the Taliban. But, you know, when you try to compromise with the mob that's trying to string you from the nearest tree, you end up holding the rope for them.

Obama needs to follow the vaunted General Petraeus and wage an effective counterinsurgency at home.

This will mean fomenting the equivalent of the Sunni Awakening -- prying moderate Republicans, if any remain, off of their caucus -- by hook or crook, with both carrot and stick -- and doing the same with voters.

This also means doing the equivalent of drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan: targeting individual GOP legislators and effectively destroying them politically. For example, relentlessly running ads in their home districts that portray their party line votes as destroying new jobs. Obama seems to be doing a bit of this, visiting the districts of House GOP leaders in recent weeks to address rallies.

Obama also needs to win the information war, which would mean, basically, hiring the linguist George Lakoff, to help shape the message so that it is both honest and effective.

Ultimately, we were moving in the right direction until the GOP took control of Congress in 2010. Most Americans know they are the albatross around Obama's neck; they want to see Obama throw them off -- that's why Obama's approval rating is low. It's not because Americans don't want to move forward into the next energy economy, or don't want to draw troops out of Iraq or Afghanistan, or don't want most people to have access health care.

Despite FOX "News"' best attempts to convince you otherwise, Obama is not an ideological player. He is a pragmatist. He can't be understood in terms of Baby Boomer era framing. He's not of the generation that had a campus love affair with Communism or joined the right in response to perceived campus shenanigans. In 1968, he was seven years old. Really, Obama is not a liberal or a conservative. He tracks the way journalists track: liberal on social issues, conservative on fiscal issues. Pragmatically hawkish or dovish in foreign policy depending on the situation. As Friedman and Maureen Dowd both recently figured out, Obama is at heart an Independent.

Don't be shocked when Obama embraces Republican fiscal policies. Every 20th century program cut creates opportunity for a 21st century initiative. Every dollar of spending by past Presidents and Congresses cut by the insurgents' battle-axe creates a space in which the next economy can be built. There is some jiu-jitsu in here, after all.

But at this point, to move forward means to decapitate the GOP, to destroy its leadership, to demoralize its ground troops, and turn popular opinion against their destructive insurgency. To tie them to the fossil barons that control them. And to undermine their propaganda.

The GOP spent ten years destroying the American economy, letting our infrastructure collapse, and encouraging corporations to ship American jobs overseas. They spent trillions of dollars to try to enshrine the oil industry's stranglehold on how Americans power their lives. The American people hired Obama to repair the damage, and finally move the country into the 21st century. The GOP -- just like Saddam's Baath Party or the Taliban -- went into Insurgency mode.

The GOP Insurgency is intended to destroy jobs and cripple the United States' ability to compete in the global economy. The fossil industries support it in order to prevent the birth of the next energy economy. The Tea Party are patriots, co-opted. A movement born apparently to rail against government spending to rescue failing corporations, turned to pawns defending the fattest welfare queens of them all: oil companies.

The goal of the GOP insurgency, just like that of the Taliban, or of Saddam's Baath Party, is to destroy Obama's Presidency, to subvert the will of the American people, and retake power.

They want to make us feel bad about our country, and our future -- so that, demoralized, we fail to stop them.

Three Graphs

2011-09-05T08:37:00.001-07:00

(from the left-wing news aggregator Truth Out.)

Then, there's the Republican Party Line:

That is unlikely to satisfy Republicans, who have clearly signaled that their strategy for the 2012 election is to argue that Mr. Obama’s economic policies are not working.

In his statement Friday, Mr. Huntsman said that there was “no clearer sign that the president has failed, and the theatrics around his far-too-late jobs speech demonstrate that he has no real plan to change course.”

The Purpose Of War

2011-08-02T12:44:00.000-07:00

Destroy capital, force austerity, and maintain the social hierarchy that keeps the oligarchs enshrined.

George Orwell, from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient - a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete - was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process - by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute - the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy - his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter - set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

(193-196).

(Above at http://www.panarchy.org/orwell/war.1949.html )

From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24sun4.html :

Gore Nails It

2011-06-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

The former Vice President and Senator diagnoses our failure to deal with our most pressing problem.

From Rolling Stone.

(Illustration by Matt Mahurin)

FOX's Telling Response To Juan Williams

2010-12-27T10:36:00.001-08:00

by Richard B. Simon

FOX "News" commentator Juan Williams -- late of National Public Radio -- says in this video that the Republican field for 2012 is weak, and that the only one with enough charisma to go up against Obama is Palin -- but she is not on the same "intellectual stage".

The response from the FOX "News" panel is that of 8 year olds when one classmate talks back to the teacher: oooohhhh. Fox News Sunday host and supposedly temperate "journalist" Chris Wallace seems stunned. He suggests that Williams is going to get a lump of coal -- in his stocking, from Santa claus -- and rapidly ends the program.

Oooohhhh, Juan. You're in trouble.

In FOXworld, saying what's obviously true means you're a bad boy -- if it undermines what Jon Stewart would call FOX's "narrative".

You'll be punished Juan.

That didn't take long, did it?

So much for FOX's much-ballyhooed championing of Juan Williams, truthteller, supposedly canned by an NPR that can't handle the truth -- or divergent opinions. Williams, a few months ago, admitted on FOX that Muslims in traditional garb on airplanes make him nervous. NPR clumsily fired him over the comment -- but Williams' firing was overdue. On FOX, he had long been tagged as "NPR Analyst", which meant that FOX viewers thought he was representing NPR -- and, by default, arguing from a "liberal" opinion position. Williams' (and Mara Liasson's) presence on FOX undermined (and continues to undermine) NPR's credibility as an objective news source. It's something that neither Liasson nor Williams seems to understand, but which FOX programmers know well.

FOX agilely moved to humiliate NPR by hiring Williams at $1,000,000 a year -- and Williams spent the next two weeks or so throwing all his recently former NPR colleagues under the wheels of the train by assailing NPR as a sort of One Party State.

In context, numerous studies (like this one, regarding belief in the false facts that underpinned the Iraq War) have found that NPR listeners and PBS watchers are the best factually informed consumers of non-print news, and that FOX "News" watchers are the worst-informed. So FOX's assault on NPR is understandable. FOX's mission vis a vis NPR is to present NPR as FOX's opposite.

Which it is -- just not in the way that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes would have you believe. FOX's spin is that NPR is, like FOX, a "news" organization with a political agenda, to get Democrats elected.

But that's not accurate. In fact, NPR is FOX's opposite because it is a real, old-fashioned news organization, presenting fact and a reasonable and reasonably balanced menu of opinion in what is probably a center-left cultural context -- hence the perception of a liberal bias to its news presentation. But NPR presents very little from the far left or the far right (the real far left despises NPR, too).

Undermining NPR is part of FOX's dual mission -- to dominate the "news" business and to get Republicans elected.

Fox is a disinformation/misinformation machine. It strings together decontextualized factoids in a miasma of half-truths and untruths. It's a propaganda campaign being waged against the American people by a multinational corporation aligned with other multinational corporations. The goal is to elect politicians who will remove "regulations" -- also known as "rules" -- and thereby allow multinational corporations to function in a world without rules.

It's something few Americans would actually want. So FOX's presentation depends on the viewer's ignorance of fact and sensitivity to emotional appeal.

NPR's existence undermines not only FOX's narrative, but its credibility.

That's what facts do to propaganda.

FOX "News" has been moving openly since January 2009 to pit Palin against Obama. She was Glenn Beck's very first guest, the day before Obama's inauguration.

Williams knows she doesn't have a chance against Obama -- but at FOX "News" -- for whatever reason -- that's heresy. When Williams says Mike Pence has no charisma, Bill Kristol looks like he's going to cry. And the other FOX panelists respond as if Williams has just pissed on the rug.

Bad boy, Juan Williams. You popped the propaganda balloon -- and had the last word.

No Christmas for you.

Congratulations, FOX "News"!

2010-11-02T23:07:00.000-07:00

The polls have closed and the results are largely in -- FOX "News" has won the election of 2010!

Congratulations, Rupert Murdoch! You are now the proud owner of the House of Representatives. Good move converting to American a few years back to avoid any problems associated with foreign ownership of the government.

And -- Glenn Beck -- congratulations! You managed to convince the angry bull to follow you instead of goring the guy who's been riding him. You are one fine rodeo clown!

Also, a hearty congratulations to the Roberts Court, which continued the conservative majority's tradition of determining the outcome of the first election of each new decade in this young century -- this time with its decision in "Citizens United" that allowed corporations to spend as much money as they possibly can to affect the outcomes of elections. You didn't have to rule on such a broad issue -- yet you did. And the corporations responded, by using their billions to wage war against Democrats.

Congratulations!

Flintstones Economy or Jetsons Economy?

2010-10-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

Remember the old argument that the kind of fuel economy increases enacted by Obama and the Democratic-led Congress would COST Detroit jobs?

Turns out, the opposite is true. Ford plans to hire new workers to compete with GM and Tesla (not to mention Toyota and Nissan) by building low emissions, high-mileage vehicles.

This is the stimulus, the automakers bailout, and the Dems' energy policies at work, moving the country on to the next thing, after decades of inaction that sunk the automakers when gas prices crept above $4.50.

Tell me again why people are considering giving power back to the GOP ... so we can go back to building cars that get fewer miles from a $5 gallon of gas than a 1915 Model T?

Back to spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on oil wars to make sure that Exxon and Chevron and Koch Industries have easy access to the raw material they sell back to us at the highest profits in the history of money?

A GOP Congress will put the brakes on all the progress the country has made toward the coming green energy economy. They've promised as much.

Likewise GOP-Corporate Gubernatorial and Senatorial contenders Meg Whitman (R-eBay) and Carly Fiorina (R-HewlittPackard), who have promised to suspend or kill all progress toward a new energy economy, in order to maintain the status quo of low-paying jobs fueled by dirty energy ... and trillions in taxpayer liability from damage caused by global warming. Whitman sees Texas -- the most polluted state in the union -- as a model for what California might some day become.

The Chamber of Commerce's Communist Chinese sugar daddies must be pleased with their investment in the future of the Republican Party -- especially "Speaker Boehner" (Seriously. Watch this.)

Likewise the multinational member-corporations of the American Petroleum Institute, who are certainly bankrolling the "shadow GOP" that is dumping tens of millions of secret dollars into this midterm election.

Because they'll drag the U.S. back to into the stone age -- while China blasts forward into the space age.

(Top image: Shanghai today. Below: Detroit in 2009.

Juan Williams And NPR

2010-10-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

Apparently, there is some sort of uproar over National Public Radio's decision this past week to fire "analyst" Juan Williams, after Williams -- on Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox "News" -- admitted to becoming nervous when he sees Muslims in religious garb on an airplane.

Williams was certainly expressing -- with brutal honesty -- a view that many Americans hold. There is some admirable quality to that -- and the idea that Williams was fired from his ten year job at NPR for admitting to his honest response (which he qualified by explaining that Americans need to delineate between Muslims and Muslim extremists) is ... discomforting.

That said, Williams is supposed to maintain a certain standard of conduct in order to remain employed by NPR, which with its member-subscription model, is among the last and best news outlets to survive the collapse of a news industry owned by corporations demanding quarterly returns. And apparently, it's in Williams contract that he not express views in public or on other news outlets that would be off-limits on NPR, because it damages NPR's credibility.

Williams' comments, if directed at another ethnic group in America, would be widely regarded as outrageous. Imagine:

"When I see an African American man walking down the street toward me, I get nervous."
"When I see that my banker has a Jewish last name, I get nervous."
"When I see that my surgeon is a woman, I get nervous."

All may be honest -- but none should be voiced in polite company by a public figure, and especially not someone who represents a news outlet that is partly funded by the Federal government.

Those quick to hurl stones at NPR for being overly "liberal" in firing Williams should note that, just a few days earlier, NPR barred its employees from attending the Jon Stewart "Rally For Sanity" in Washington next weekend, for the same reason. NPR employees are expected to maintain journalistic impartiality. Again, that's reasonable, because NPR receives government funding (though much less since the mid-1990s, when Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution decimated federal funding for public broadcasting for its perceived liberal worldview.)

While Williams' firing last week seemed clunky, at best, NPR was addressing a much larger problem that it should have dealt with a long time ago.

Williams and Mara Liasson, both NPR commentators, have long worked for Fox "News" as well as for NPR -- both, for years, are identified on-air on Fox as representing NPR.

Although David Brooks, who represents conservatism on numerous NPR and PBS programs as well as in the New York Times OpEd pages, argues (last night on the PBS News Hour) that NPR shoots right down the middle in both coverage and commentary, in FoxWorld -- as has become obvious this week -- NPR is the farthest-left bastion of the liberal media.

The great problem for NPR -- and I'm not sure they even realize this -- is that by appearing on Fox News programs tagged as "NPR Commentators" they represent NPR -- and Fox viewers understand that they are representing a liberal worldview.

This gives Fox viewers the mistaken impressions that 1. Williams and Liasson (an African American man and a caucasian female who are likely intended to serve as symbolic stand-ins for Obama and Clinton) are expressing liberal points of view -- when clearly both are fairly conservative; and 2. that NPR is a liberal organization, rather than an impartial news outlet.

I'll quote from a note from a conservative friend with whom I once jousted:

You seem to think I only get my information from Fox News or Glenn Beck, when in all reality the first time I ever watched the Glenn Beck show was about five months ago, and most of the time I do not get home in time to see his show and do not even TIVO it even though we have the capability. I am actually a bigger fan of Special Report with Brit Hume, but now with Brett Baier that provides viewpoints from multiple points of views to include Mara Liason and Juan Williams from NPR.

This gentleman remains convinced that because Williams and Liasson express their views on Fox, he is being exposed to liberal views. That also means that when Williams or Liasson agree with Britt Hume or Brett Baier or Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, then those Fox personalities are being centrist, moderate, bipartisan, and reasonable -- and anyone who disagrees must be really far out there to the left.

This damages NPR's credibility, because, again, it falsely leads Fox viewers to believe that NPR commentators -- even the most conservative of them -- are by definition expressing liberal views. And that defines NPR as a liberal media outlet, rather than the straight news outlet that it is.

And, honestly, their roles as opinionators at Fox undermine Williams' and Liasson's credibility as news analysts on NPR.

NPR, in recent years, asked Williams and Liasson to stop identifying themselves as representing NPR -- but the damage has been done. Fox viewers see both as representatives from liberalism, and NPR as a liberal bastion. It all helps to innoculate Fox viewers against actual fact -- but it also serves as fodder for the conservative extremists who now seek, once again, to strip NPR of its funding, because they perceive NPR (thanks now to Williams and Liasson) as a hotbed of liberalism.

Really, NPR should have given both Williams and Liasson the choice long ago -- NPR or Fox -- or given both the boot. The double-agency endangers NPR's funding and therefore its very existence. Now, if they fire Liasson, it will be seen as a purge.

That Williams is now serving the right wing agenda by assailing his long-time employer day and night from his new $2 million gig at Fox (where he'll still be seen as representing NPR -- only now as a "whistleblower") indicates that, at best, he lacks judgment.

That Williams believes that Fox really wants his two cents, rather than for him to fill Alan Colmes' former role as liberal stooge -- and black, liberal stooge at that -- is pretty solid proof that he's a fool.

________________________________________
________________________________________

AFTERMATTER:

Here's Williams on "Good Morning America" -- as reported by the Washington Post -- repeating the FOX party line:

"I've always thought the right wing was the ones who were inflexible and intolerant. Now, I'm coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, if it's representing the left, is just unbelievable. And especially for me as a black man, to somehow, you know, say something that's out of the box. They find it very difficult. . . . I think they were looking for a reason to get rid of me. They were uncomfortable with the idea that I was talking to the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity."

(emphasis added)

Williams is actually underscoring how right NPR was to dump him -- and how wrong they were to not have done it long ago.

His role on Fox "News" is to damage NPR's credibility by presenting NPR as a creature of the left, rather than a reasonable, fact-based news outlet. And so it continues.

Liasson should do the right thing and resign from one post or the other -- she's putting her employer, NPR, in the same jeopardy.

Turn The Page: Obama's Iraq Speech

2010-09-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

The shallow analysis of Presidential speeches by those paid big money to do so is amazing and shameful -- and damaging to our national discourse. Don't any of the people who are paid to opine on Presidential addresses actually read them?

At the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer purposefully ignores Obama's argument to claim that Obama is not interested in fighting the war in Afghanistan. Richard Cohen, blogging at the Washington Post, asks "What was Obama's Oval Office Address about, exactly?" Michael Gerson, who -- the Post (like the News Hour, where he occasionally fills in as the conservative opiner) consistently neglects to tell its readers -- was Bush's speechwriter, judges Obama's speech, by Gerson's own standards as set out in his previous column, as insufficient -- including insufficiently triumphal.

Over at Fox News, the "news" headline (on an AP story) read: Obama Marks End of U.S. Combat Mission in Iraq, Salutes Bush.

"Salutes Bush"? After a paragraph that begins with Bush announcing the bombing of Baghdad, and continues with a litany of all the ways in which the war went wrong, Obama says he had spoken with Bush that morning, and tells us:

It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.

In other words, while I still maintain that this was a dumb idea and a seven-year-long disaster, I won't question Bush's motives.

If that's a salute, it's one-fingered. It's not the first time Obama reaches out to Bush with one hand, and slips the shiv between his ribs with the other.

The sort-of central metaphor -- that the country is a ship at sea during a series of storms -- is a recurrent theme in Obama's speeches (here he says that the troops are "the steel" in the ship of state.) A ship at sea isn't that resonant in a speech about a desert war.

Still, Obama's speech is -- as usual -- clearly organized, its thesis transparent:

The war in Iraq is over. It's time to "turn the page" -- to ramp up and therefore finish the war in Afghanistan, and to make rebuilding our own country "our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president."

That is because, as Obama puts it, "over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity."

This, Obama argues, has been a lost decade, in which all our resources -- a trillion dollars -- have been dedicated to fighting wars, while our infrastructure, industry, competitiveness, prosperity, and tendency toward progress and innovation, have all disintegrated at home, leaving the middle class (which he pinpoints as the source of our nation's strength) devastated.

Krauthammer doesn't like this. Krauthammer argues that rebuilding our own country is a distraction. Krauthammer thinks our central mission as a people ought to be fighting the war in Afghanistan, not rebuilding our economy. I suppose, if that's so, he should buy himself a plane ticket to Kabul toot sweet, and get to work.

Though, I have to say, I don't seem to recall Krauthammer arguing that Bush should keep the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan as the country's central focus. As I recall, he was among those who led the cheer squad when Bush pulled US Troops out of the Battle for Tora Bora, and sent them to Iraq to prepare the way for invasion -- and allowed bin Laden and friends to escape into Pakistan, where they remain today.

I don't know how the guy looks himself in the mirror in the morning.

Really. I don't.

Nods to the troops are requisite at this point -- and Obama's felt rote. But his message is this: although this war sucked, the troops who waged it are awesome -- and we're going to give them medical and psychological care, and send them to college.

Honestly, watching the speech, I thought it was lousy, too. Obama seemed tired. His voice was hoarse, and so uncharacteristically high-pitched (and therefore weak-sounding) -- like he'd had too many smokes and not enough water. He'd also already given a speech earlier in the day to troops. He's also not that great at speaking to a camera, rather than to people. Had he given this speech before Congress, it would have had much stronger resonance.

On paper, the speech is characteristically rhythmic, straightforward, and difficult to disagree with. Anyone -- including David Brooks and Mark Shields for the News Hour -- who tells you that it wasn't about anything, or that it was vague or unfocused or purposeless, must have been, like Maureen Dowd, lulled into inattention by the new carpet. They certainly didn't read it.

After reading it, you realize that, purposefully or not, Obama was projecting war-weariness.

The most resonant phrase in this speech is, "It's time to turn the page."

We've lost a decade. We need to move on and deal with everything we've left undone as we've dumped blood, money, and energy into Iraq. Yes, he says pretty clearly, we need to finish killing the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- a job which, again, was left to metastasize when we shifted focus, troops, and resources to Iraq.

Here's the key paragraph, the one in which he redifines what our purpose is as a country, and tells us what he sees is now the central purpose of his presidency:

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.

So, reform the schools, invest in community colleges, take away oil and coal's artificial (and government-subsidized) price advantage over alternative energy technologies -- and therefore unleash innovation and crank up manufacturing in what will be our next great industry: clean energy.

(In case you were wondering why the creepy, oil-soaked Koch brothers are "waging war" against the President.)

Like I tell my students, when somebody tells you, this is our most urgent task, it must be our central mission as a people, and it is my central responsibility as president, you might want to pay attention to what that person actually says.

And when the President of the United States makes a speech on television, and you want to understand what he said, you'd better read it.

Meet The Tea Party Puppetmasters

2010-08-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

Charles and David Koch, the wealthiest men in America behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have built a vast network of think tanks and veiled nonprofits, hoping to destroy the United States Government.

Among their front groups are Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity -- the groups who brought you the Tea Party and the much-ballyhooed protests against Health Care reform.

Glenn Beck is their rodeo clown, Fox News their megaphone, Sarah Palin their candidate.

The precedent, of course, is Wall Street's attempted coup against FDR in the 1930s -- a putsch in which fascist industrialists hoped to enlist Major General Smedley Butler, who had carried the water for "US interests" -- corporations -- across the world.

The Tea Party folks may be well-intentioned and scared by change and uncertainty, but they're also being manipulated by very, very, very wealthy liars and propagandists.

First they caused a run on ammunition with the false charge that Obama would outlaw all guns.

Will these folks come top DC, all revved up, their heads full of Fox's lies, Beck's paranoia, and Palin's exhortations of violence, bristling with loaded weapons as they have at so many similar events around the country since Obama was inaugurated?

Guns or not, if Glenn Beck, from his electric pulpit on the National Mall, says "storm the White House," will they?

And then what happens?

This is what my relative, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who survived Kristallnacht in Berlin, was talking about when worried aloud, two years ago, that the nosediving economy made fertile ground for fascist violence.

The bottom line is that a well-armed segment of the US population is being hornswaggled by the most powerful corporate interests in the country into supporting a supposedly-anti-corporate, supposedly grassroots movement, which is actually designed to enshrine those corporate interests' dominance of American politics and governance.

This weekend, read the outstanding reportage on the Koch Brothers by the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, here.

Mayer was on Fresh Air yesterday, as well.

If you want to see how the message is fed to the faithful, get a taste of how FOX "covered" Obama's first 100 days, from Media Matters:

Chickenshit Democrats Abandon Energy Climate Bill

2010-07-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad news.

Not one fucking Republican in the Senate is willing to put the fate of the species ahead of their drive to regain power by obstructing everything?

Kerry, Harry Reid, bring the bill and make them filibuster it on live TV. Where is the brave Lindsey Graham now? Where is Maverick Senator John McCain, who said not two years ago that global warming was a serious threat to national security? Sitting on his gnarled old voting hand to pretend he's as much of a know-nothing nitwit as the other jackass who's trying to take his job?

Obama -- you're the most powerful human being on the planet. How about twisting some tails here?

Here's what Andy Revkin says:

On a host of issues, Obama campaigned as a voice of reason, willing to listen to all views, amid all the polarized shouting. But on climate and energy, he has not yet, apparently, found the strength to break free of the 20th-century-style left-right fight to forge a positive path that is true to the scope and time scale of the climate and energy challenge and could resonate with Americans, particularly the young generation that will inherit the environment being shaped by decisions, or indecision, now.

Could it be that the White House has concluded what some political analysts have quietly told me - that only a Republican president could muster the Senate votes to pass a meaningful climate bill? That sounds strange initially but isn't so strange when you consider the history of major environmental legislation and note that a moderate Republican could bring his or her base and lure many Democrats, while a Democrat is unlikely ever to lure sufficient Republican support to get 60 votes on a climate bill.

If that's true, we are certainly doomed. The only national Republican with a voice on Global Warming is Schwarzenegger -- and you'd have to change the Constitution. At this point, Republicans wouldn't support him -- exactly because he's taken some action on global warming.

Barack, this was supposed to be the moment, remember: "At this moment ... in this election ..." etcetera?

Brother, you're losing me. There's not a lot of time for your usual rope a dope here.

Of course, that's the Republicans' whole plan: filibuster EVERYTHING to make it look like the Democrats can't lead -- then return triumphantly to power.

But if you filibuster EVERYTHING, you look like assholes.

Unless nobody makes you actually go through with the filibuster. Then nobody actually knows that you're obstructing EVERYTHING because they never SEE THE OBSTRUCTION ON TELEVISION.

Maybe 40 flabby bags of fossils flapping their jowls for 72 or 127 hours would drown out the Fascist propagandist Glenn Beck's Racebaiting Scalpathon and the "gore sex scandal" -- at a factoid-ticker near you just in time to silence Gore during the debate on this bill.

If the Republicans in the Senate had to talk all day and all night for days and days for every bill they've threatened to filibuster in this weird new system where a 60 vote majority is required to pass anything, three-quarters of them would have dropped dead eight months ago.

If they want to block the energy bill, make them actually block it -- and let those hypocrites Graham and McCain explain why what was a dire threat to humanity in 2008 is not any longer -- without anyone having done anything about it.

It couldn't possibly be clearer what a complete Republican takeover of Congress would look like -- the Bush years, a decade of inaction. The decade in which it became too late.

The sucky part is that a Democratic majority can't act to save humans from self-destruction either -- and they actually get it.

Unless they represent fossil states.

Oh well.

We're ka-screwed.

Reich: Nationalize BP For Duration of Emergency

2010-05-31T13:44:00.000-07:00

   Captain Benjamin Sisko, Badass.

This makes sense.

Robert Reich, one of the smartest minds in the country -- and former Labor Secretary (under Clinton) argues that the federal government should hold BP's Gulf assets in receivership for the duration of the oil spill catastrophe.

Key quote?

No president would allow a nuclear reactor owned by a private for-profit company to melt down in the United States while remaining under the direct control of that company. The meltdown in the Gulf is the environmental equivalent.

He's 100% right.

I would add that the U.S. should also freeze BP's assets in U.S. banks, as we would do with any other terrorist or criminal organization -- or rogue nation -- so that we can ensure that justice is done. This is a rogue corporation. Think of it as bail. You fixa the Gulf, you getta your money back. Otherwise, we fixa the Gulf -- and you shit outta luck.

This whole thing, by the way, is what happens when polluters are allowed to externalize the costs of pollution; when we make the polluters pay, every dollar, every time -- there's a fiscal incentive to avoid pollution. The corporation's fiduciary duty, then, requires the corporation to avoid that cost. But typically, we don't make polluters pay every dollar, every time -- the taxpayers pay. And if we don't force BP to pay every dollar, the rest of us will be paying for this disaster for the rest of our lives. So anyone who tries to tell you that environmental regulations are bad for taxpayers is a liar or a fool. And likely both. In other words, a Republican.

BP is not an American corporation (and no corporation is an American corporation). If it can move its assets elsewhere to guarantee that they will not be subject to forfeiture, it will. Just like Exxon. Or Halliburton. Can we please stop calling Exxon an American corporation? A corporation that makes tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, yet pays zero dollars in taxes, is not a citizen. Ain't that right, Tea Partiers?

By the way, here is a list of BP brands: ARCO (here on the West Coast -- and it's pretty sad to see cars lined up at the ARCO in Marin County because it's cheap. ARCO is BP, people.), Castrol oil, AM/PM Mini Mart, Wild Bean cafe -- and in Germany, Aral.

Boycott BP brands.
Freeze BP's assets in US banks.
Nationalize the emergency in the gulf.

Time for Obama to be the badass.

Oilbama In The Mines of Moria

2010-05-05T10:08:00.001-07:00

Richard B. Simon
May 3, 2010

The most interesting story about the "BP oil spill" in the Gulf of Mexico was a piece in the LA Times over the weekend that provided a pretty convincing explanation for what may have happened.

As it turns out, a crew of men from Halliburton - yes, Cheney's company, the one in which he still owns stock, and which profited handsomely from all the Bush Administration's policies - had been working to cement the rig's oil-sucking pipe in place on the sea floor, twenty hours before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20.

This oil rig was no ordinary offshore drilling operation - this was among the first deep-water rigs (hence the name) to operate in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP has been particularly active this decade. It was this rig that found the deep off-shore "Tiber" reservoir of oil in 2009, the strike in the Gulf of Mexico that is among very few significant new oil finds in the world these days - and which has emboldened an otherwise dying industry with dreams of more, more, more.

And this was an exploratory well. Halliburton's men were nearing the point at which a cement plug could be inserted into the hole, so that the well could be temporarily abandoned, apparently to await the installation of a production rig.

The well-head - the place where the pipe goes into the sea floor to worm its way through mud, silt, and rock and eventually into the highly-pressurized oil - sits at 5000 feet below the ocean's surface. That's awfully deep - too deep, unfortunately, for a human being to go down there and fix the problem. The first responders on the scene were robots.

Another problem with drilling at 5000 feet is that the ocean floor at that depth is riddled with frozen pockets of crystallized methane hydrates. Methane, as we know, is a volatile explosive gas, often used these days as fuel.

The Times reports that Hallibuton engineers had raised concerns about the cementing process and the methane hydrates. Cement, as it cures, undergoes a long chemical reaction that generates a lot of heat. And that heat, Halliburton engineers fretted in 2009, could destabilize nearby methane hydrates.

Some speculation has centered on methane pockets frozen into crystallized formations beneath the seabed that could be warmed by the cementing process and become unstable. A 2009 Halliburton presentation to the drilling engineers association described the challenges of methane hydrates, asking: "When do hydrates become unstable?" and "Will cement hydration cause this outcome?" The presentation noted that "gas release is a challenge for safety and economics."

A company spokesman declined to comment on whether methane hydrates, warmed by cement curing, may have been a factor in the gulf explosion.

Again, Halliburton's crew was cementing the pipe in place on the ocean bed just hours before the rig exploded. That means that the cement was just starting to get really, really hot.

Imagine, if you will, viscous liquid cement pumped down a 5000-foot pipe to the ocean floor, to "slurry" up around the wellhead pipe and thereby seal it in place. Imagine now that thick blob of cement, enough to hold a pipe gushing with oil at pressure equal to the weight of 5000 feet of ocean, heating up as it cures, and that curing cement triggering a methane explosion at 5000 feet - around the base of a pipe filled with venting latent volatile, flammable natural gas, connected to a massive reservoir of crude oil. The curing cement triggers a methane explosion at the wellhead, sending flaming oil and gas shooting up the pipe and onto the rig, igniting the rig in that spectacular fire - and, just like the jet fuel cascading down the steel superstructure of the World Trade Center towers, superheating and thereby softening (and likely burning) the steel, causing the rig to collapse into the sea.

The Wall Street Journal's reporting also points to Halliburton's cement job.

"The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement," said Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer in the oil industry.

Halliburton cementing is implicated in a similar catastrophic rig failure in Australia in 2009:

Halliburton also was the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea, off Australia. The rig there caught fire and a well leaked tens of thousands of barrels of oil over 10 weeks before it was shut down. The investigation is continuing; Halliburton declined to comment on it.

Elmer P. Danenberger, who had recently retired as head of regulatory affairs for the U.S. Minerals Management Service, told the Australian commission looking into the blowout that a poor cement job was probably the reason oil and natural gas gushed out of control.

The Journal reports elsewhere that this well lacked a secondary shut-off valve, which could be operated by remote control. Attorney Michael Papantonio - the attorney for plantiff fishermen who are already suing BP for the spill - argues that the secondary emergency shutoff valves were mandatory until the Cheney Energy Task Force's deregulation of the energy industry, which, as we well recall, was the young Bush Administration's first priority on entering office in 2001. After all, if you're a corporation, why spend $500,000 of your own money to prevent something that some other sucker would have to spend the billions to clean up?

This page did not fret when President Obama announced on March 31 that his administration would approve new offshore deepwater drilling - twice as far offshore as the Deepwater Horizon was operating in April. Had it been the Bush administration, the response from these quarters would have been different. That's not purely hypocrisy - it's a matter of context.

The new drilling was a clear sop to Republicans and fossil state Democrats who insisted on an "all of the above" energy plan (as if supply were the sole problem, and not consumption-related planetary climate catastrophe).

Less noticed in environmentalists' (and news organizations') flutter and fury over the newly-minted Oilbama was the President's announcement the next day of an unprecedented increase in fuel economy standards -- which would save an ocean of oil every single year, for eternity - and was a far more significant move that, coupled with the drilling announcement, signalled a seriousness about getting the country off fossil fuels altogether.

According to the Christian Science Monitor,

The first cars to be affected by the law will be automakers' 2012 lines. By 2016, model year greenhouse gas emissions must not exceed an average of 8.8 ounces per mile - a 21 percent reduction from today's levels. To get there, vehicles' gas mileage will need to achieve on average 35.5 miles per gallon fleetwide - a 40 percent improvement from current levels ... the rule will cut the nation's oil use by 1.8 billion barrels over the vehicles' lifetimes. It is the equivalent of removing 42 million cars from the road, [EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson] said.

Bush expanded drilling as the only answer to our civilization's energy problems. There was no accompanying action to deal with climate change - other than to purposefully torpedo all international attempts to deal with the problem, on behalf of the state-less corporations that his administration served as proxy. The Bush administration's agenda was to release multinational energy corporations from government regulation - to take away the rules that protect ordinary humans from the amorality of the corporate urge to profit.

Without a rule - a government regulation - requiring that unprecedented deepwater oil drilling be accompanied by catastrophic spill prevention plans, and that those plans would be bolstered by backup plans, there were no plans whatsoever. No secondary device to backup the now-famous failed blowout preventer. No plans for quickly sealing a blown wellhead, for containing a spill, or for cleaning up a spill. It was as if, even in unprecedented drilling conditions, failure was not an option. In those heady days of hundreds of billions in profits and loosened regulations, who could have - who would have - predicted the breach of the wellhead?

Last week, a BP spokesman likened using robots to attempt to stop the flow of oil at 5000 feet to operating in outer space. According to the Guardian (UK),

The plan put into operation yesterday called for four underwater robots to dive 1,500 metres (5,000 ft) below the surface of the water to try to activate the gargantuan system of pipes and valves that sits next to the well on the ocean floor.

BP said it was the first time such an operation had been mounted at this depth.

"It is a slow process," said Ron Rybarczyk, a spokesman at the command centre in Louisiana.

"If you can visualise it, it's like robotic arms doing something outside the space station. It is operating something with a mechanical claw on it that grasps things and turns things and adjusts equipment way down at the floor of the ocean."

BP also admits that the robots may not be successful. Doug Suttles, the chief operating officer of BP's exploration unit, said activating the blowout preventer was a highly complex task - in part because it remains unclear whether the valve is working.

The valve should have stopped the leak at the outset. "The issue we have is that we don't know the condition inside that blowout valve," he said. The laborious effort is by far the quickest means available for capping the leak.

They are flying completely blind. Now in the third week of unabated flow of an ocean of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP suggests that it could take up to three months to drill a second well, in order to relieve enough pressure to allow the capping of the failed wellhead. But even that solution is not certain. We are in uncharted territory. This has never happened before - we've only been drilling for oil at these once-unfathomable depths for a few short years. BP is inviting all comers with ideas for how to stanch the flow to step forward.

That's not assuring.

Lucky for BP, a 1991 law, passed cynically in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, caps the amount of damages the company must pay at $75 million.

Unlucky for the rest of us, as BP engineers toy with dropping a giant steel box over the wellhead, the spill is nearing the Loop Current, which would carry it into the Gulf Stream - and up the east coast of the United States to Greenland, then on to Europe.

It certainly seems within the realm of possibility that the hole could never be plugged, that we have opened a wormhole to catastrophe, an ocean-connecting passage like the Panama Canal, only this time irreparably opening an ocean of noxious triassic dinosaur goo into the already-damaged water ocean that is necessary for sustaining life in our time.

In this case, it was Tolkien who warned us.

In the first installment of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, the titular fellowship - four Hobbits, two men, a dwarf, an elf, and the wizard Gandalf - are taking a shortcut through the mountain Khazad-dûm.

Here dwarves once dug the Mines of Moria in search of mithril, a mystical metal, used to fashion impenetrable armour, and so valuable that one suit of it is worth more than the Hobbits' entire homeland, the Shire. But Moria is a haunting ruins - chamber after chamber of high vaulted ceilings, borne atop ornate columns carved from the living rock. The dwarves are all dead. What remains of their once-great civilization are bones ... and the occasional bit of armour.

"Something has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains," Gandalf tells his spooked companions. "There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world."

The Balrog - firebreathing and black, a monster from the prehistoric depths.

"The Dwarves tell no tale," he continues later, "but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also was it their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled."

Fossil fuels have provided us with both the enormous wealth that allowed us to rise from our primordial state, and the means of our own destruction.

It all depends on what happens next.

Take Climate Action Today -- Call Your Senators

2010-04-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

On Monday, we put in calls to California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, as well as to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, asking each to prioritize the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham energy and climate bill rather than divert the Senate's attention to immigration law reform.

It feels silly to ask Barbara Boxer to prioritize environmental affairs -- she's the head of the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee, and among earth-based life forms' best friends in government. On environment, California leads.

But Boxer's office told us that even so, it's important to be able to count the calls.

That's how it works, folks -- you call your representatives, and they use the numbers to argue in favor of your position.

It's called representative democracy.

That's why the Tea Partiers are getting so much grease.

As for Reid, Thomas Friedman -- thankfully, he's on a pro-energy-bill jag this week (let's hope it continues until the bill passes) -- writes that the reason Democrats are considering shunting what would surely be yet another long, arduous, and divisive debate on immigration, ahead of a ready-to-go bill on the most urgent issue that faces humankind, is to garner Latino votes in Nevada, where he is fighting for his political life, and may well lose his seat.

The GOP's strategy -- decapitation. Cut off the Democrats' head and their majority caucus will fall apart.

But really, if this is how Reid makes decisions on the most pressing matters of out time, he should lose his job.

I know partisan Democrats are arguing that the most important matter is to hold on to the majority. After all -- and with this I agree -- you won't see any action on climate (or, really, anything else) with the Republicans in charge.

However, a Congressional debate on immigration reform is guaranteed to be, again, longer and more contentious than the health care debate.

It took over a year to get the health care bill through.

We've spent the last twenty years dragging our feet on climate change -- doing nothing as the north pole disintegrated, megahurricanes and tornado clusters accumulated, and the ocean turned to acid.

We have neither time to wait nor waste.

As Friedman reminds us today, the Chinese are cleaning our clock at the next big thing. That's outrageous.

China is having a good week in America. Yes it is. I’d even suggest that there is some high-fiving going on in Beijing. I mean, wouldn’t you if you saw America’s Democratic and Republican leaders conspiring to ensure that America cedes the next great global industry — E.T., energy technology — to China?

The Arizona bill is despicable (though not surprising from the state that refused to ratify the Martin Luther King holiday), and important to counteract at the federal level. But neither it nor the 2010 election is as urgent as global catastrophe.

There's a bill on the table. Ready to go.

Please take five minutes to call both your Senators today. Say something along the lines of:

FOR DEMOCRATIC SENATORS:

Hello, my name is ___________. I'm a constituent, and I live in ___________. I'd like to register a comment with the Senator. Senator Lindsey Graham has pulled out of the climate bill because he says the Democrats and Senator Reid want to use immigration reform as a political bludgeon this November. Graham is right. The earth's capacity to maintain a climate fit for human life is more urgent than immigration law -- or the next election. We can not afford to wait another month, let alone another year, or another electoral cycle. I urge you to prioritize the climate bill. I live on planet earth, and I vote.

FOR REPUBLICAN SENATORS:

Hello, my name is ___________. I'm a constituent, and I live in ___________. The Chinese are cleaning America's clock when it comes to the next major global industry: clean energy. That's largely because your party, in the majority and the White House, wasted a decade pretending that the problem of global warming didn't exist, and that we could bomb our way to energy independence. It's time to act to pass the energy and climate bill. I am concerned about energy jobs and energy independence, and I vote.

Then call Reid and tell him:

Senator Reid, the fate of life on earth is the most urgent issue. Green jobs are more important to Americans than your job. Get the Climate bill through -- then do immigration reform. And maybe the votes will follow your leadership.

Might as well call the White House, while you're at it. 202-456-1414.

President Obama, save the planet. Then fix immigration law.

Green Tea Party

2010-04-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

A major energy and climate bill has passed the House and is on the table in the Senate -- for the first time in history.

Republican Lindsey Graham says the Democratic leadership wants to put the bill on hold -- again -- to rush legislation on immigration reform, in response to the new Arizona law that all but criminalizes being brown. He has, for now, pulled his support from the climate bill in protest.

He's right.

Preserving the planet's ability to maintain human life is more urgent than reforming immigration law. More urgent than health insurance. More urgent than regulating derivatives, whatever in heck those are.

Environmental writer Bill McKibben spoke at my university on Earth Day -- like Al Gore, he was bothered that no strong national movement of voters has emerged to push politicians toward action on climate change. He started 350.org, to advocate a return to 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 -- a point beyond which, he says, the atmospheric composition is incompatible with the stable earth system in which human life developed. We're at around 390 ppm today.

You know times are strange when mainstream voices are urging civil disobedience -- including Gore.

Thomas Friedman, no radical, suggests that a new green movement should emerge with the passion of the Tea Parties ... to push politicians of both parties to support the climate bill.

Indeed, it is a shame the fossil fuel industries still have such a stranglehold on Congress. But it's the best we're going to get, and we have got to get started. However, without a centrist Green Tea Party movement - one that brings the same passion to cutting emissions that the Tea Party brings to cutting deficits - even this effort will never pass.

This bill introduces a carbon price and other means to control the CO2 emissions of various sectors of the economy, without an economywide cap-and-trade system. The bill's goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. But to garner broad support, it will also expand domestic production of oil, natural gas and nuclear power and offer tax breaks to manufacturers who make their facilities more energy efficient and create green jobs.

I'm no fan of Friedman's "tic" (as the New Yorker put it) of trying to coin phrases. And as a title for something designed to prevent China from becoming the dominant manufacturer of green energy, "Green Tea Party" sounds an awful lot like something that would happen at the docks in Shanghai, not Boston.

But this makes more sense than most things these days.

Where do we start?

First call your Senators.

Call A Fox A Fox

2010-03-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

Writing in the Washington Post this weekend, former New York Times editor Howell Raines finally calls "Fox News" what it actually is -- a propaganda channel spreading lies and disinformation in the right wing's war against the Obama Administration. And he chastizes legitimate news organizations for allowing the cable channel to get away with it.

In case you hadn't noticed, Fox began airing the Glenn Beck program on January 19, 2009 -- the day before Obama's inauguration. Beck's first guest was the defeated Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Before the media circus" and the "political bullcrap," Beck tells his audience (he's weeping, of course, ostensibly because he and Palin both have special needs children -- but it's an emotional appeal, designed to soften his audience), "she was my kind of leader."

Beck and Fox have spent the ensuing year poisoning the political discourse in this country. In the Bush years, Fox vilified anti-war, anti-Bush protestors. But in the Age of Obama, Fox doesn't only "report" on political discontent -- it creates it.

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Fox "news" hosts Sean Hannity, Beck, Greta van Susteren and others essentially created the Tea Party movement by accusing Obama repeatedly of racism, of crimes, anti-American sentiment, of violating the Constitution, of not actually being a U.S. citizen, of trying to turn the United States into the Soviet Union -- and of racism! Then by reporting on sparsely attended protests (where people praise Glenn Beck as The Only Person Telling The Truth, and portray Obama as a witch doctor, or as Hitler) and turning them through heavy media coverage into something with the appearance of a national phenomenenon. The media coverage on a national cable channel, of course, makes it a national phenomenon.

It's all a bit bizarroworld.

It certainly looks like Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes -- the foreign billionaire and "former" GOP strategist who own and run Fox -- saw how effective anti-Bush sentiment was at sweeping Democrats into power in 2006 and 2008, and decided to create an alternate reality (or, rather, perpetuate and mutate their existing alternate reality) in which every charge that had been leveled against the Bush Administration -- rightly, and with plenty of evidence from real journalists and real truthtellers -- would be aimed at Obama, and supported with lies, half-truths, and willful misinformation.

It was on Beck's program that we learned that the Obama Administration had within it, any number of "czars" who were extraconstitutionally-appointed Marxists -- as evidenced by the word "czar!" Never mind that the real Marxist Bolsheviks murdered the Czars. Fox's program depends not on informing its audience but on programming its uninformed audience.

That's how I came to read, in a long email exchange with a family friend (and, disturbingly, a military officer), that Beck had saved America from "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones, a well-known activist here in the Bay Area who trains kids in Oakland who might otherwise have little opportunity, for jobs in the coming green economy.

If not for people like Glenn Beck, Van Jones the self-proclaimed communist and 9-11 Truther would not have announced his resignation as "The Green Jobs Czar" at midnight on a Saturday during a Labor Day Weekend (the slowest news timeframe there is- what a coward!). Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying, "The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Patrick Henry and many other Founding Fathers were considered a pain in the King of England's backside and were hunted for treason and to be executed on site for speaking out against what they considered were oppressive taxation (a mere 3 %) and onerous government conditions in the colonies. How many other unchecked Czars exist among the 48 and counting that were not required to undergo Senate confirmation? When I took my Oath of Office as an Officer in the United States Army it was to Support and Defend the Constitution of These United States, not the Communist Manifesto. What part of Limited Self Governing do you really think we are still operating under?

I knew this family friend was getting his information from Fox and Beck -- and nowhere elsse -- because no one else in the country has this misunderstanding about what a "czar" is. It's not a charge that emanates from anywhere else. A czar, in the U.S., is someone tasked with solving a particular policy problem. But in Fox's alternate reality, a czar is a Communist operative. And the presence of czars in the Obama administration is cause for violent revolution. And this is presented as "news".

Beck and others on Fox literally are fomenting violence against Obama, and calling for armed insurrection. They are either drinking their own koolaid, or really, really cynically and purposefully feeding poison to people who tune in to Fox because its editorial slant matched their own views -- and then they get cranked up into this terror about "the direction of the country."

If terrorism is the use of violence to whip up fear in order to effect political change, then Foxism is the use of fear to whip up violence in order to effect political change.

You certainly get the sense that "patriots" like Beck and Ailes and Murdoch would like to see Obama assassinated -- perhaps so that Sarah Palin can run against Joe Biden in 2012.

Some of the Tea Party folks are rightly angry about a long swing toward corporate control of our government. But then at just the moment when we actually do have a president and a government that might be disposed to do something about it, Fox steps in and plays to them -- promoting the rallies, then reporting on them as news (in the olden days, as Howell explains, this was called "yellow journalism".)

Beck has even essentially created his own cult -- following all the rules -- called "the 912 project" -- a reference to the 9/11 attacks -- based on 9 "principles" and 12 "values" that members are supposed to follow. Beck himself is the charismatic leader. "Progressives" are the "out group" to be vilified. Watch Beck's show and then read Nineteen Eighty-Four -- it's the 2 minutes hate, every day, for an hour. And it's presented as "news."

Beck goes so far as to criticize Republicans -- enough that even his own network-mates pretend to believe that he is equally opposed to both parties.

But seriously. He's not fomenting violence against conservatives.

He only criticizes Republicans to inure himself against the charge that he's merely a shill for Republicans.

Because when your job is to vilify -- perhaps to the point of violence -- a government that is, for the time being, controlled by Democrats, then -- in a system of only two parties -- who will be the beneficiary?

Yet Fox viewers think they're getting more than one side of any given story because, for example, their weekly news roundtable includes two analysts -- Juan Williams and Mara Liasson -- who report for National Public Radio.

In Foxworld, NPR is a liberal organization, so Williams and Liasson read to Fox viewers as representatives of the liberal worldview -- and so Fox is inured to the charge of one-sidedness. Never mind that if you listen to what Williams and Liasson say (and they are, pointedly, an African American man and a caucasian woman), they are very clearly both political conservatives.

Or, at least, they play one on TV.

The fallout is that Fox viewers are 1. spared exposure to other views, 2. led to believe that they have been exposed to other views, and therefore 3. kept trapped in an alternate reality.

Step one for becoming a cult leader (according to the social psychologists Pratkanis and Aronson in Age of Propaganda) is "create your own social reality":

The first step in creating a cult is to construct your own social reality by eliminating all sources of information other than that provided by the cult ... The second step in constructing a social reality is to provide a cult's-eye view of the world. This picture of the world is then used by members to interpret all events and happenings ... Repeat your message over and over again. Repetition makes the heart grow fonder, and fiction, if heard frequently enough, can come to sound like fact. (307)

Next, create a granfalloon.

The granfalloon technique requires the creation of an in-group of followers and an out-group of the unredeemed. The technique allows you to control members by constantly reminding them: "If you want to be a chosen one, then you must act like a chosen one. If you are not chosen, then you are wicked and unredeemed. To be saved, you must act like you are supposed to act." (309)

And so, we have Beck's "9 Principles" and "12 Values", to remind the chosen to act like the chosen -- and to vilify those who, by definition, do not:

9 Principles, 12 Values

The 9 Principles

1. America Is Good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
God "The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained." from George Washington's first Inaugural address.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
Honesty "I hope that I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider to be the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man." George Washington

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
Marriage/Family "It is in the love of one's family only that heartfelt happiness is known. By a law of our nature, we cannot be happy without the endearing connections of a family." Thomas Jefferson

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
Justice "I deem one of the essential principles of our government… equal and exact justice to all men of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political." Thomas Jefferson

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
Life, Liberty, & The Pursuit of Happiness "Everyone has a natural right to choose that vocation in life which he thinks most likely to give him comfortable subsistence." Thomas Jefferson

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
Charity "It is not everyone who asketh that deserveth charity; all however, are worth of the inquiry or the deserving may suffer." George Washington

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
On your right to disagree "In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude; every man will speak as he thinks, or more properly without thinking." George Washington

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
Who works for whom? "I consider the people who constitute a society or a nation as the source of all authority in that nation." Thomas Jefferson

The 12 Values
* Honesty
* Reverence
* Hope
* Thrift
* Humility
* Charity
* Sincerity
* Moderation
* Hard Work
* Courage
* Personal Responsibility
* Gratitude

(emphasis added)

Of course, the Granfalloon depends on followers believing that the out-group -- progressives -- do not share these values -- and are therefore the enemy.

And this is "news".

The ultimate goal appears to be to make Sarah Palin president. Palin has now been officially made a Fox commentator. The network has built a studio in her home in Wasilla, Alaska, from which, as Bill O'Reilly explained, she may refute any charge that is levelled against her -- by 60 Minutes, for example, or the New York Times -- by, in other words, actual journalists who report on the actual world.

Or perhaps Fox only wants Palin to be a candidate and to be defeated. The network feasts at the power trough when Republicans are in power -- but it's a cash cow when Democrats lead. So maybe the network's money men want to set Palin up to fail -- because another seven years of Obama will mean another seven years of big profits for Rupert Murdoch.

Or maybe Fox really does want Palin to be president. She would be an easy mark for the corporations who seek to prevent the United States from exercising its national sovereignty over their affairs.

The sick part is that the "Tea Party" people, whose middle class rage is largely understandable, but who seem to be largely uninformed or misinformed -- or at least to have little context in which to understand who is doing what in American politics and governance -- are being led to try to throw out the bums, when throwing out the bums would mean replacing them with Republicans, whose politics wrecked the economy, shipped the jobs overseas, and ravaged the middle class in the first place.

And so these self-styled "patriots" take their marching orders from a foreign-owned corporation, and join the "912 Movement" and pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor ... to restore the Republicans to power.

And the moment that happens, we will see the Glenn Beck show disappear -- or at least metastasize once again, along with the rest of Fox, back into the pro-government Voice of the Conservative Revolution!

And those mere animals who drank the tea and yet remain yet less equal than other animals will look through the window, and the pigs and the farmers will be drinking and eating and arguing together, all red-faced and triple-chinned, and once again, it will be impossible to tell them apart.

___________________________________________________________________________
Also of interest today, Frank Rich's column on Bushist deadenders' current putsch to rewrite history.

Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News? By Howell Raines

Poison Is Freedom

2010-03-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

by Richard B. Simon

The Clean Water Act was written so as to prevent businesses from using "navigable" waterways to dispose of their toxic waste for free.

But it's only free to them. At some point, some other sucker has to clean it up and pay the price for the damage -- through death, medical fees, loss of revenue downstream (for, say, fishermen) -- and actual cleanup costs.

That other sucker is always, always the taxpayer.

Pollution is what happens when a company realizes that it's much more profitable to let some other sucker pay for its waste disposal than to pay for it itself.

By fighting against "government regulations," businesses force the government to pay for their waste disposal. And the taxpayer gets stuck with the tab.

Meanwhile, corporatist prestidigitators like "Glenn Beck" (a self-described "rodeo clown" -- he's the one who distracts the angry bull so the guy who's riding it can get away unharmed) go on television to convince their audiences that when businesses force taxpayers to pay for their waste disposal, that's Freedom; and when government forces businesses to pay for their own goddamn waste disposal -- so that taxpayers aren't stuck with the costs -- well, it's time to hold a Tea Party to protest taxes.

And so ill-informed anti-tax "Patriots" write letters to their members of Congress demanding that the government get off "our" backs -- and allow the pollution of America's waterways (and air, and upper atmosphere) -- the cost of which will ultimately be paid with higher taxes.

This reminds me of the geniuses in my hometown who oppose a local ordinance requiring town approval if you want to do something on your property that could affect the health of a wetland -- which is what purifies groundwater -- when almost every single family in town drinks groundwater from a backyard well. If you poison the wetland, you poison your own well. And so they elected a new "conservative" town board that opposes the wetland ordinance -- and, of course, opposes taxes.

Now courts are finding -- logically, if you're looking at the letter of the law and not its spirit -- that the word "navigable" limits the Clean Water Act to rivers that can be travelled by boat, year-round. So businesses are running their outflow pipes (Free Waste Disposal Units) into smaller streams that feed the rivers, rather than the rivers themselves.

The upshot is that, according to the Times, nearly half of Americans drink from waters that are no longer protected from industrial poisons by the Clean Water Act.

That's great if you like dying of poisoning. Which appears to be what the Tea Partiers are for.

If the Tea Partiers want to drink poison, they could save a lot of tax dollars by cutting out the middleman. And then if Beck fancies himself such a truthteller, perhaps he should hurry up and drink the hemlock, too -- and stop poisoning the well.

Congress must close this loophole by amending the law to remove the word "navigable".

Or are they too beholden to the unwitting and those who manipulate them to act on anything?

This Is The Change

2010-01-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

Obama addresses House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore Friday morning.

This is the stuff, right here, people.

This is the change.

Props to Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz for calling Obama out on earmarks and lobbyists in the administration. Props to Obama for answering.

It's a remarkable moment in recent history -- and emblematic of a generational change. This is what can happen when we're no longer fighting the Boomers' campus civil wars.

It's what my good friend, the poet Ben Hollander, would call a "Ritual of Truce."

Obama's thesis in his State of the Union was, basically, we need to get beyond "the partisanship, and the shouting, and the pettiness" if we are to solve the enormous problems that face the nation.

That's what I've always read as what Obama meant by "change" -- largely because I've read his speeches and his book. That's why I voted for him.

Let me note that I intended to send this out even before I got this political form email from the Obama campaign asking me to forward it to everyone I know:

Richard --

Yesterday, the President stood in front of a gathering of House Republicans and took questions for more than an hour, urging them to put aside partisanship and work together for the good of the country. MSNBC described it as going straight into "the lion's den."

He was inspiring.

We've highlighted some of the key moments and trust me, it's worth checking out.

Watch the video

Once you do, please pass this along to everyone you know.

This is the sort of honest dialogue and political courage that we all need to move our country forward.

Let's do it together,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

There is a "DONATE" button -- which is a bit cynical -- but I don't think it's Kabuki.

Next, let's see him do the same with the Democrats, and let them grill him on Afghanistan and closing Guantanamo.

And let's see this be a regular feature of our contemporary American political discourse.

Major Disaster for Democracy

2010-01-21T15:30:00.000-08:00

Richard B. Simon

He who has the most dollars, says the Supreme Court's conservative-corporatist majority, gets the loudest voice in our democracy.

A corporation can now spend unlimited money to influence elections.

The corporatist argument is that corporate speech is protected free speech, as entitled to citizens. This is based on an accident of history, where a court clerk inserted a statement into the Justices' opinion on a railroad case that gave corporations human rights.

This is what Bush wrought -- the complete corporate takeover of American governance -- through two ardently pro-corporate Supreme Court appointees.

This decision furthers the conceit that a corporation has the same rights as a human being.

Never mind that a corporation is bound by law to seek only one thing: more profit in this quarter than in the last.

Justice Kennedy writes: “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

Who's to say that a corporation is an association of citizens? Does anything bar foreign nationals from owning stock in and investing in "American" corporations? How does a multinational corporation that has no national loyalty get the same rights I do?

Honestly, I'm more worried about Exxon having Miranda rights than about the underpants bomber.

Perhaps Congress should pass a law rescinding such rights for any corporation that is owned in part by a foreign national or entity.

Better still -- Congress must pass a law stating forcefully that a corporation is not a citizen, is not a human, and is not entitled to human rights.

For, until then, the moneyed behemoths can use their thousands of billions to flood the media with advertising that is proven to change minds through repetition.

Or are such things (meaning anything not supported by the right wing or "moderate" corporatists) off the table because 52 % of Massholes voted for the pretty boy instead of the candidate who didn't campaign?

Looking At Afghanistan, Seeing Iraq

2009-12-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

Many liberals or progressives (as is the contemporary parlance) are bemoaning Obama's commitment of 30,000 additional troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan as a massive betrayal.

The left-wing news aggregator TruthOut's headline, on its article on Obama's Afghanistan speech, blared "Obama Invokes 9/11 to Explain Afghanistan Troop Surge" -- as if that were an illogical, illegitimate conclusion to draw, analagous to Bush's willful conflation of 9/11 and Iraq.

Apparently, Obama is just like Bush now.

Meanwhile, those on the right who support a continued US presence in Afghanistan are twisting themselves into pretzels, in an attempt to re-capture their earlier self-righteously "Patriotic" War Fervor.

They actually agree with the policy -- but the Republican Party's larger political strategy demands that they oppose Obama at every turn. So they bemoan the time it took to weight the options, or the number of soldiers being sent, or setting a date for the transfer of security duty to the Afghans. They argue that the enemy will just melt away and wait until we leave to start causing trouble again.

They don't seem to get that if the Taliban melts away allowing U.S. and NATO troops eighteen months of relative quiet to help the Afghans build a security apparatus, then we might actually be able to get out of there.

And how about that wily Karl Rove, saying that he will stand up and applaud Obama's troop surge into Afghanistan. What he's applauding is obviously the wedge it drives between Obama and the anti-war left.

If Rove really thought an additional 30,000 troops was such a great idea, wouldn't the Bush Administration have kept enough force in Afghanistan in the first place?

A new Senate report confirms what you only had to have read in the newspaper at the time: In 2001, when U.S. Special Forces had al Qaeda's top leadership -- including bin Laden and Zawahiri -- cornered at Tora Bora, the Bush Administration (Bush, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks) let them slip away.

This page has argued for years that Team Bush purposefully allowed bin Laden to escape, so that his spectre could be used to justify an invasion of Iraq that had been discussed at their very first Cabinet meeting -- eight months before the 9/11 attacks.

After all, the argument was:

IF Saddam has WMD
AND Saddam + Osama = true love forever
THEN the invasion of Iraq is just, on grounds of pre-emptive self defense.

No Osama, no threat, no justification for war. It's so simple, even a member of Congress can understand it.

The Bush Administration pulled US Special Forces out of Afghanistan to send to Iraq before the job was finished. They let al Qaeda slip away and reconstitute, leading to major attacks in London, Madrid, and Mumbai. They abandoned Afghanistan -- left it to NATO to peacekeep, but failed to complete the massive nation-building campaign that Americans were happy to do. They wanted to do it in Iraq. Hence, the bait and switch.

The U.S. fought a key battle in the Cold War -- perhaps the decisive battle -- in Afghanistan. The Soviets invaded that country in 1979 to try to plow their way through South Asia to get to a warm water port, from which they would be able to bring Caspian oil to market in winter.

The U.S. funded, armed, and trained Afghan "freedom fighters" -- the Mujahedin -- to push the Soviets back.

It worked. And it was a good thing -- had the Soviets been able to get their oil to market, the USSR may not have gone bankrupt and dissolved by 1991. It meant the end of the Cold War.

But the U.S. never cleaned up the mess. We pulled out, and the Mujahedin splintered into the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, and numerous local warlord fiefdoms. Afghanistan, its central government ravaged by the Soviets, fell into a brutal decade of civil war, pitting warlord against warlord -- many of them fighting with U.S. weapons.

The eventual victor was the Taliban. The Taliban became the willing host of Osama bin Laden, its leader Mullah Omar and bin Laden marrying their families together -- and Afghanistan became the home of the al Qaeda camps where the 9/11 hijackers trained.

It's our mess.

We broke that country -- twice. And then we left the Afghans to deal with the consequences. Twice. Both times, a man named Bush was in charge. Both times, his priority was Iraq.

The first time, it ended badly for the United States.

This time, the Taliban, active on both sides of the border, is actively trying to take over swaths of Pakistan. They actually are trying to get nuclear weapons. And Pakistan has them -- mounted on long range missiles. They may not be able to reach the U.S. -- but can you imagine a nuclear-armed Taliban nuking Mumbai to try to pry Kashmir away from India? I can.

These are the guys, after all, who destroyed ancient 100-foot-tall buddhas carved into the side of a mountain -- with artillery -- because their mere presence was an affront to their fundamentalist (per)version of Islam. The Taliban are the guys who pull little girls out of school and throw acid in their faces, you'll recall.

How is it liberal or progressive to not oppose that?

If you're a pacifist, and you oppose all war, well, that's understandable. But we don't yet live in a world where everyone opposes all war.

If you believe that 9/11 was an inside job done by the Bush gang, then obviously there's no valid reason to be in Afghanistan in the first place. Except perhaps oil.

And it's valid if you think that there's just not enough money left to do this thing. It really does mean more debt.

But Tom Friedman, who championed the war in Iraq as the right moral thing to do, arguing that we shouldn't deal with Afghanistan because it's so expensive and ultimately, there's no broader prize in Afghanistan for us (such as the democratic transformation of the Arab world promised by Iraq War boosters) is shockingly cynical.

Now people are arguing that we should leave Afghanistan because its government is corrupt. Karzai is not an honest partner. Well, guess who initially pushed the former Unocal operative to run that country? The United States.

That means that Karzai's our mess to clean up too.

By the end of this sentence, most Americans would forget I said they have very short memories.

The thing we should have learned from 9/11 is that when you don't clean up after the wars you win, your messes grow and grow until they come back to bite you in the ass.

The things that Bush said were so about Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in 2002, but which were plainly false, appear to be true about the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009 -- except that Pakistan actually does have nuclear weapons.

It's another sick after-effect of the Bush disaster that Bush so effectively conflated Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda, Saddam, bin Laden and the Taliban, that even now -- seven years later, Americans still can't see the difference.

Iraq was not Afghanistan. That doesn't mean that Afghanistan is Iraq.

War is best when avoided. But in a world in which we don't all agree to be at peace, it seems to be still necessary.

Believe me, it does give me pause when so many of the people with whom I tend to agree -- Jon Stewart, Friedman, even Michael Moore -- disagree. And it's all, of course, very easy for me to say. I'm not in the military. Unless it lasts so long that there's a draft, I likely won't be going. So, at some level, I don't have a leg to stand on. I want it to end.

But we spent many years trying to get someone a little more trustworthy -- someone whose decision-making capacity was not riddled with financial, psychological, and oedipal conflicts of interest -- into the White House to look at the intelligence and determine a course of action that's actually good for the country.

Obama never said, when he ran for President, that he would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he said was that he would end the war of choice in Iraq in order to finish the war of necessity in Afghanistan -- the one waged in response to an attack on American soil. The one where we deposed the Taliban and were going to help the Afghans prevent their -- and al Qaeda's -- return. The one that military brass, not liberal politicians, nicknamed "the good war." Good because it was actually justified. It was actual self-defense.

He's spent ten months untangling the thicket -- and he's saying that this is how we end it.

Isn't that why we hired the guy?

_______________

Terry Gross interviewed Peter Bergen, CNN's National Security Analyst -- and an expert on bin Laden, al Qaeda, and Afghanistan -- on Fresh Air last week about Afghanistan. His analysis was trenchant -- and worth a listen.

And David Brooks, had an also reasonable piece in the New York Times on Friday, arguing that Obama is not your typical rah rah war leader, riding into battle on a white horse, costumed as Great Hero -- but one who is doing the kind of calculated strategic thinking that we need right now. Obama doesn't want war -- he's a reluctant warrior. And that's the kind of American warrior that actually wins.

Betting On America's Failure

2009-11-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

The Republican strategy is clear.

The government of the United States of America, with the Executive and Legislative branches in Democratic hands, is actually working to solve major problems that face the country, its people -- and all people.

If the health care reform bill passes and becomes law, all the political benefits would inevitably go to the Democrats in power. If I didn't have health insurance last year, and the Democrats passed health care reform, and now I am able to buy affordable insurance -- or my former insurance company is required to re-instate my coverage -- then the Democrats will get the credit.

As well they should.

The Republicans have nothing to gain by America's success. So they're betting on failure.

If -- with or without Republican help -- Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress actually solve the problems the American people sent them to Washington to solve, Obama will be re-elected, and the Democrats will retain control of Congress.

The Republicans lose.

If, on the other hand, those problems go un-solved -- and America fails to fix the health care delivery system, fails to stave off catastrophic global warming, and fails to repair the economy -- the Republicans will use the failure to their own electoral advantage. They can make the case that those problems represent the failure of the Democrats (and count on Americans forgetting that many of these problems were created or exacerbated by Republican inaction.)

So they are betting on failure -- and then working as hard as they can to ensure that failure ensues. That's why they are obstructing the health care bill, and it's why they're still stalling on a bill to internalize the hidden costs of greenhouse gas emissions.

But just in case those bills do pass, and those problems are solved -- or, at least, the United States government actually seems to be moving toward solutions to major problems (rather than actively working to prevent solutions), the Republicans are working hard to convince their "base" -- and independents who are disillusioned by the state of the economy -- that repairing the health care delivery system in this country is a Nazi plot. And that internalizing the costs of greenhouse gas emissions with a cap and trade program is a Communist plot. All designed to destroy Americans' Freedom.

And speaking of America, Freedom, Nazis, Communists, and global warming -- today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- a conservative who was believed to have blocked, for political reasons, then-Candidate Obama's attempt to speak at the Berlin Wall in 2008 -- lectured the United States Congress on the need to move quickly to avert disastrous climate change due to greenhouse gas-caused global warming.

The Democrats cheered, while the Republicans sat on their hands.

The sight has become familiar.

From 2002 to 2009, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee was chaired by a man who hails from an oil state; and whose biggest campaign donors hailed from that state's oil and gas industries, and who equated the greenhouse effect (the thing that prevents earth from being, like its moon, a barren, frozen rock) with big foot and the loch ness monster -- a hoax. And so Congress did absolutely nothing to solve the problem of global warming and the attendant climate disaster.

For eight years, America's climate policy was run by oil industry operatives working within the White House. That's why, instead of working with our traditional allies in Europe and Asia to solve the problem, we were working with Exxon's allies -- the Saudis and the Chinese -- to scuttle action -- at every single global climate negotiation from January 2001 to January 2009.

Now that we have people who actually understand how the actual earth actually works running the Senate Environment and Public Works committee -- its chair is my Senator, Barbara Boxer -- nuts and fossil shills like Inhofe have been sidelined. And this country is actually beginning to work to solve the global warming crisis.

Today, after Merkel's plea, the committee met to work on the Cap and Trade bill. But the committee's Republicans boycotted. Why? They want the Environmental Protection Agency to run some more tests, some more economic models that include "a new set of assumptions" about the economic effects of the bill.

George Voinovich of Ohio, representing the absent GOP senators, pled with the Democrats to put off action to stave off global warming, for just a little bit longer -- out of "decency."

You see, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's report estimated that Cap and Trade would cost the average American family $175 per year. The Republicans want voters to believe that it will cost the average American family thousands per year.

So they are stalling. They want a different outcome. They want the facts to fit their portrayal of a reality in which it simply costs too much to save humanity from self-destruction. It's a reality in which scientists are liars, the Nobel Prize is awarded to undeserving scoundrels, and the only people brave enough to tell the truth are crypto-fascist talk show hosts.

The Republicans spent the first decade of the 21st century running this country into the ground, dismantling the social contract, and shipping our money off to Iraq to be burned on behalf of oil companies -- to maintain the power of an old paradigm that served Republicans very well.

And now they demand that we wait just a darn minute -- don't move so fast -- before we solve all the problems they left unchallenged. They want a second chance.

It's only common courtesy, the Republicans appear to be arguing, for the rest of us to allow them a little more time to plot their return to power before we actually begin to solve our problems without them. It's the "decent" thing to do to put off solving problems that have become crises, for just ... a little ... bit ... longer ...

Because if there's one urgent crisis the Republicans are interested in solving, it's the problem of the empowerment of minorities.

Republican minorities.

In the House, the Senate, and the Electoral College.

Six Degrees To Devastation

2009-09-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

The UN Environment Programme now holds that if the current, unmandated, approximate world targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 are met, the world's average temperature will increase by an astounding 6 degrees by 2100 -- that's within the lifetime of today's young children.

We need serious, hard targets, and we need to meet them immediately.

The tragedy is that had the United States signed onto the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, we would have already reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2009. That was the target -- ask Senator James Inhofe (R-Oilklahoma). He's on the anti-action warpath right now and is planning to be a one-man army of Climate Denial at Copenhagen in December. Perhaps he'll finally realize that the only people on earth who don't believe that global warming is real and caused by humans burning fossil fuels are American "Conservatives".

Inhofe argued in a 2003 Senate floor tirade, sequentially, that 1. global warming is not happening, 2. it's not caused by humans, 3. it's good for us, 4. Doing something about it is bad for the economy and will kill jobs in the hundreds of thousands -- especially for poor "blacks and hispanics." Today he is literally arguing that global warming isn't real because God exists.

Interestingly enough, Inhofe refers throughout his 2003 speech to "greenhouse gases" -- which is a pretty tacit -- if accidental -- admission that the greenhouse effect is, indeed, real.

What else is interesting is that Inhofe says that the Kyoto targets would have been virtually ineffectual, anyway, because they would only reduce temperature by a fraction of a degree by 2050:

Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, found that if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by all signatories-now I will note here that this next point assumes that the alarmists' science is correct, which of course it is not-if Kyoto were fully implemented it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 0.13 degrees Celsius by 2100. What does this mean? Such an amount is so small that ground-based thermometers cannot reliably measure it.

I'll take the fraction of a degree reduction in temperature over a six-degree rise any day. Two degrees is the difference between the last Ice Age, when much of North American sat under a mile of ice, and today. Six degrees means a Heat Age even more severe, that will last for thousands of years.

According to Inhofe himself, in 1998, when Kyoto was signed, six degrees was worse than the worst-case scenario that climate modelers imagined. In 2009, six degrees is our best case scenario.

Inhofe also cites James Hansen, one of the country's top scientists at NASA, arguing in 1998 that Kyoto would not be enough:

Similarly, Dr. James Hansen of NASA, considered the father of global warming theory, said that Kyoto Protocol "will have little effect" on global temperature in the 21st century. In a rather stunning follow-up, Hansen said it would take 30 Kyotos-let me repeat that-30 Kyotos to reduce warming to an acceptable level. If one Kyoto devastates the American economy, what would 30 do?

In case you were wondering what parts of the economy Inhofe's worried about, and why, here are Inhofe's top five campaign donor industries, over his Senate career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Oil & Gas $1,223,723
Retired $606,846
Leadership PACs $524,073
Health Professionals $449,900
Electric Utilities $435,967

As for James Hansen, he is warning these days that the Waxman-Markey climate bill -- the Cap and Trade legislation that internalizes the cost of greenhouse gas emissions -- is disastrously insufficient.

Hansen writes for the Huffington Post that the 1000-page Waxman-Markey bill has been so watered down by Fossil Lobbyists that it will not stave off the worst of Climate Change. He proposes that Cap and Trade in this form be scrapped in favor of Fee-and-dividend.

There is an alternative, of course, and that is a carbon fee, applied at the source (mine or port of entry) that rises continually. I prefer the "fee-and-dividend" version of this approach in which all revenues are returned to the public on an equal, per capita basis, so those with below-average carbon footprints come out ahead.

A carbon fee-and-dividend would be an economic stimulus and boon for the public. By the time the fee reached the equivalent of $1/gallon of gasoline ($115/ton of CO2) the rebate in the United States would be $2000-3000 per adult or $6000-9000 for a family with two children.

The Senate, he says, must act with urgency to repair the House bill.

The problem is that we are dealing with Republicans who, like Inhofe, have been fooled by the Fossil Lobbyists into thinking that global warming is a "liberal issue" -- some sort of ruse to get Democrats into power and who therefore fail to understand (or to want to understand) that the greenhouse effect is real and caused by burning fossil fuels.

We are also dealing with coal-state Democrats who claim to be "moderates" opposed to environmental extremism, but who are actually serving the interests of their home state industries, rather than those of the entire human species.

As Hansen points out, these "leaders" will all be dead or "doddering" by the time the rest of us bear the brunt of the consequences of their inaction -- so they can afford to put their own short-term political and financial interests ahead of the long-term interest of the species. They don't appear to comprehend that their decisions now will actually affect the entire earth system on the grandest scale imaginable.

President Obama seems to have had -- at least publicly -- a hands-off approach to policy-making in the Congress. But Obama should follow his own lead in his UN address Wednesday (which made averting climate disaster one of four pillars of an urgent new internationalism) and push his former colleagues in the Senate to toughen up the climate bill.

There is a big difference in perception of future consequences between a forty-something leader who will still be around in 2050 -- and whose daughters may be old women in 2100 -- and a room full of 60-, 70- and 80-something-year-old leaders for whom such dates remain abstraction.

As Obama often bluntly says of his economic policy, if it fails, he won't have a second term. He should be so bold with climate. For if we fail, we won't have a second chance.

Complicating the politics is electoral math: oil states are red, coal states swing. The loss of coal-related jobs in Pennsylvania could cost Obama a second term if they're not preemptively replaced with new-energy jobs.

And Obama needs to win a second term if action on global warming is to continue at any rate. No leading Republican appears to even believe that global warming is real. Not Palin, not Huckabee, not Romney, not Boehner (who clearly doesn't have even a rudimentary understanding of science) or McConnell. Professor Gingrich appears to believe that global warming is real, but that all the solutions that could solve the problem are liberal-communist plots to destroy the economy, the country, and capitalism.

Even McCain, who seemed to lead the GOP in accepting the reality of the global warming threat, proposed an "all of the above" energy policy. That's great if the problem is merely (as the good folks in Chevron's ad agency would have you believe) energy supply, but if the problem is that burning fossil fuels causes major planetary disruption, it's exactly wrong. As Hansen makes clear, burning more oil and coal will not solve global warming -- it will only make it worse.

Politicians -- including Obama -- pay at least lip service to this idea of "clean coal." Typically this refers to carbon sequestration, which means burning coal, and then somehow "storing" the waste carbon dioxide.

Here's what the eminent geophysician James Lovelock has to say about carbon sequestration:

The world's annual production of carbon dioxide is 27,000 million tons. If this much were frozen into solid carbon dioxide at -80 ºC it would make a mountain one mile high and twelve miles in circumference. (The Revenge of Gaia, 73)

Each year.

This is a reality that our politicians appear unable to comprehend.

When I have suggested to friends in environmental advocacy that they reach out and educate members of Congress who don't understand the science, they get quickly frustrated and explain that they can't even get in the door to talk to the Republicans. Their ears are closed.

The Fossil Barons have so successfully poisoned the national debate that members of the GOP are inured to facts. They truly believe that the vast majority of the world's climate scientists are pulling some kind of hoax that only Republican members of Congress, right-wing talking heads, and oil and coal executives can see through. And they believe (not entirely incorrectly) that their political constituencies are similarly convinced. In such quarters, Al Gore's advocacy of action to repel disaster is taken as concrete evidence that global warming is a liberal plot to make us all slaves to evil solar and wind power executives.

You even have the spectacle of columnist George Will gloating that the totalitarian regime in China agrees with him and is dunderheadedly refusing, along with India, to accept mandatory emissions reduction targets as part of any international agreement.

Global warming science needs to be extricated from such partisan foolery.

We need a national teach-in, a way to educate those who don't get what the greenhouse effect is, or how earth's systems work.

I had hoped, since before he did so to confront the health care reform "debate", that Obama would call a special joint, prime-time session of Congress, and explain -- or have Hansen explain to the Congress and the American people, with all the weight that his position at NASA commands -- how the world actually works. I'm not sure that works on Republican members of Congress -- but it does appear to increase understanding among the American people.

As it is, we've been working on climate change problems with less than half our national brain. Republicans and fossil state Democrats refuse to believe it even exists -- so they're not helping to come up with any solutions.

And we're running out of time.

Cool It

2009-08-28T01:32:00.000-07:00

   Map of projected temperature increase due to global 
   warming in August, 2100, from The Nature Conservancy.

by Richard B. Simon

One lousy summer and the whole country has gone bananas.

The most visible manifestation of this weird rage that seems to have gripped the American people is the "Town Hall Meetings" held by Democratic members of Congress to discuss proposed reforms to the interface among citizens and the medical, pharmaceutical, and health insurance industries.

It seemed as if Republican operatives were planning to greet Democratic lawmakers with shitstorms of fury. Indeed, the GOP and the health insurance industry sent out frightening messages, trumpeted by Fox News and talk radio commentators, about how "Obamacare" (itself a phrase designed to summon the doomed "Hillarycare") would lead the country to "socialism" which is equated alternatingly with either Soviet or Nazi-style totalitarianism. Never mind that the two were opposed ideologies.

The town halls were interesting to watch. There was something ominous about rooms full of people jeering and shouting down members of Congress. Those folks weren't there to talk or make their ideas known -- they were there to make noise, to rattle the Senators and House members.

At one meeting, held by the recently-minted Democrat Arlen Spector, of Pennsylvania, a woman in the front row asked vague questions along the lines of, "Arlen, Arlen, when are you going to stand up for the Constitution and restore our country to what the Founding Fathers intended?" A befuddled-looking Specter started talking about warrantless wiretapping -- a Bush-era abuse of the Constitution (he was defending his record; really, he didn't do such a great job of oversight as Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee).

But that wasn't what this woman was asking about. She seemed to be addressing these vague charges that somehow the Obama Administration was in a full-throttle assault against the Constitution.

It was interesting. I would have liked to ask Specter a similar question -- three, four years ago. And there is something compelling about citizens venting rage at members of Congress, who often seem very removed from how Americans live.

Then this woman sat down, and the man sitting directly behind her stood up, and said something like "Thank you for coming to speak to the people who elected you -- Republicans." The woman in the front row, meanwhile, had whipped out a video camera, and was filming this man.

It was pretty clear, after seeing four, five, six people at a few different town halls, ask their questions in the same format, "will you promise to oppose a bill that includes ...." horrible thing X?, it became clear that these people were filming campaign commercials for the Republican challengers in the midterm elections of 2010. They were plants.

But they weren't all plants. Some of the folks asking questions had good suggestions, and legitimate concerns.

There also are a lot of angry people out there. Some of them, sure, can't process that a man with brown skin is their leader. Some of them don't like Democrats. But many Americans are hurting, badly, from the recession. They don't see things getting better quickly for them, and they are mad.

They are mad that "the government" handed their money to a bunch of billionaire bankers supposedly to save their dying corporations, and therefore the economy -- only to see it lavished on vacations on private islands and megayachts -- while their own bank accounts have run dry.

They are mad that "the government" gave their money to GM just to keep it afloat, when their businesses are suffering and dying and wrecking their family's dreams right behind their devastated retirement accounts, and no one is helping them save their businesses.

They are mad that the government gave their money to their next-door neighbor (the bum) to help him buy a car, when no one helped them buy a car.

This anger is legitimate, and also misplaced.

It certainly doesn't help that propagandists like Glenn Beck, who works for a television network whose goal is to produce an "alternate reality" to counteract other news channels in a way designed to help the GOP regain and retain power in the government -- and which is owned by a foreign corporation -- spend hours on the air each week fomenting rage and violence, and comparing the new Administration to the Nazis.

Beck's job is to take all that anger and use fear and misinformation to direct it at the Democrats, so that Republicans may re-take Congress and the White House. And it is effective. Beck is a wild-eyed propagandist. His show is frightening, no matter which side of whatever political divide you're on.

And so we are really having a national conversation over whether the government is going to murder senior citizens to save a few tax dollars that would be otherwise spent on health care.

The Fox News pundits are literally calling for violent revolution.

All this because their party has been out of power for, what, seven months?

And the people who are so enraged that they are bringing guns to Presidential speaking engagements don't seem to get that they're showing up the day after the bomb went off and throwing rocks at the guy who's trying to clean up the mess. And the rocks are being handed to them by the guys who set the bomb.

Cool it.

When you're angry and afraid, you'll do all sorts of irrational things that you'll regret later -- like wage war against a country that didn't do anything to you.

So cool it.

That's what my dad has always said to me when I've gone off the deep end, all riled up about some injustice, real or perceived. After the cooling, then comes the rational explanation and discussion -- and, typically, understanding.

Cool it, America.

First of all, we have to clear a few things up -- because a lot of different policies have become conflated, in some cases purposefully.

Let's start with the bank bailouts. It's not fair that billionaire bankers are vacationing on their private estates in Croatia with our money after we gave it to them to clean up a mess that they made, taking with it the value of our retirement accounts.

Still, I seem to remember, about eight months ago, a near-panic that we were heading into a new Great Depression. People are still hurting, the bank accounts are still empty, and the jobs haven't come back -- but you don't hear folks fretting about the next Depression anymore. People are buying houses and cars. People are being hired. As much as it may represent theft, the bank bailouts seem to be working. It's not fair -- but it's probably better than the whole global economy collapsing entirely.

Next is the stimulus. The stimulus is not the bank bailouts. The stimulus is another program entirely. It is money pumped throughout the economy -- on things like infrastructure projects and subsidies for alternative energy sources like wind farms and solar power plants.

When you start a project to, say, rebuild part of the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, you generate jobs -- jobs to design it, jobs to plan it, jobs to actually build it. Once constrution begins, all the people who are working on that project are making money -- which trickles out throughout the economy, from the coffee shop across the street from the trailers that suddenly has a hundred new twice-daily customers, to the stores where those workers buy clothing for their kids. That's good for local businesses, and it's good for local tax revenues -- which then fund further infrastructure projects. And so on.

When the dot-com bubble collapsed in San Francisco, it wasn't just a bunch of Internet startups that disappeared. It was also the restaurants and the furniture stores. I bought my desk from a place that liquidated the dotcoms. They had desks as far as the eye could see, in a giant warehouse. So the businesses that built new desks were competing with cheap, used, like-new desks. The collapse spread throughout the economy.

Stimulus is intended to do that, only in reverse. And it seems to be taking root in infrastructure projects across the country.

This isn't extraneous wasted money. You have to recall that the United States has essentially been frozen in time for the last eight years. Call it the Wasted Decade. Or don't you remember the bridge collapsing in Minnesota? The city lost in Louisiana? The President who said the high point of his presidency was catching a particularly large fish on his ranch in Texas? We built plenty of infrastructure in Iraq -- and then we blew it up. And then we built it again. It was great if you happened to, say, own a contractor with a lot of business in Iraq.

But not much happened over here.

The nation's infrastructure has simply not been maintained. This is eight years worth of work that needed to be done, and is getting done now. We're putting it on the credit card, because that's the only choice we have. How can you rebuild the economy if our bridges are falling down?

And this is ... Obama's fault?

In the last decade, the United States has spent $200,000,000,000 a year in Iraq -- using our tax dollars to ensure that oil keeps flowing. We have invested practically nothing in alternative sources of energy that would allow us to get off oil, and prevent future entanglements in the Middle East.

China and Germany and Japan have booming industries in solar panels, wind turbines, and hybrid cars -- and we're bailing out GM.

We've been standing still. We are way behind. We need to catch up if we're going to continue to be an industrial power.

We're not going to do it by not spending money on solar and wind while we subsidize oil to the tune of hundreds of billions.

Cool it, people.

We're paying plenty per gallon for gas. It's just hidden in our income tax. We need to get off oil entirely, by shifting our energy use from gas-powered cars to electric cars. That figures in the GM bailout, and cash for clunkers.

Cash for clunkers is great. It took 700,000 cars off the road and replaced them with cars that get, at a minimum, 5-10 miles per gallon more.

The average car travels 15,000 miles per year. Those cars would have travelled 10.5 billion miles next year. At 15 miles per gallon, that would have meant 700 million gallons of gasoline. At 22.5 miles per gallon, the new cars (presuming an average increase of 7.5 mpg on the new cars), the new cars will burn 467 million gallons of gasoline. That's a savings of 233 million gallons of gasoline -- that's 233,000,000 gallons -- each year, or 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline over the next ten years, which translates roughly to 92 million barrels of oil (presuming a yield of 25 gallons of gasoline per barrel of oil).

All that for 3 billion dollars, which is about what we spend in Iraq every six days.

Not a bad deal, I'd say -- especially since that money, too, will go to, yes, the banks in the form of interest; to the car dealers, which are local businesses (and then to the families of the salespeople, who will spend it on food and clothing at other local businesses); and to the automakers, one of which we own and are hoping will become solvent so that we can sell it.

GM has already re-opened a shuttered plant, meaning jobs.

And that's not to mention the progress toward dealing with global warming. That 92 million barrels of oil that will not be burned into the atmosphere is among the most significant actions taken to prevent catastrophic greenhouse warming in this country in the last 30 years.

Global warming is a real problem, a real, planet-scale disaster unfolding. For eight years, we did absolutely nothing to make it better, and everything to make it worse. The ice caps are melting. Sea level is rising. It is happening, and faster than anyone predicted.

Which brings me to cap-and-trade. Yes, its purpose is to raise energy prices -- but not on all forms of energy. Only on those that, used correctly, lead to melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, expanding disease vectors, mass extinctions, crop devastation, and widespread displacement of humans, and therefore wars.

The purpose of cap-and-trade is to make the people who are either buying or selling the products that are damaging the planet's suitableness for human life pay for the cost of repairing the damage, before the damage happens -- so that there is no damage.

As it stands, if we do nothing, guess who will pay to relocate all those people from their drowned cities? Think FEMA trailers -- for New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Charleston -- all up and down every coast. The oil and coal companies oppose it tooth and nail, because as it is, you're the sucker who gets to pay for the damage. Cap and trade will make them pay for it. After all, it's their product and their profit.

Sure, they'll pass on the cost to the consumer. The answer to higher fuel prices from cap-and-trade is to buy a car that gets better mileage. Insulate your house. Use less energy from fossil fuels. It ain't a tax if you can opt out. And you can opt out -- by shifting your energy use away from burning dinosaur corpses.

Cool it.

Obama has been President for 219 days.

His administration has helped stave off a depression, saved General Motors, begun to rebuild a devastated national infrastructure, and reduced U.S. gasoline consumption by 233 million gallons of gasoline per year in a matter of weeks. They've begun to wind down the war in Iraq, and try to clean up the disaster we created by abandoning Afghanistan. They've rescued American hostages from pirates, from North Korea, and from the Myanmar junta in Burma.

It's not a bad start.

Green Velvet Revolution, Live

2009-06-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

Folks, here's Nico Pitney's outstanding liveblogging coverage of the extraordinary events unfolding in Iran at the Huffington Post, including news reports, video coming in via YouTube from Tehran, photos, tweets, emails, and satellite communications.

At this stage, the government appears trying to put a lid on widespread street protests by shutting down the country's electricity grid and placing opposition leaders under house arrest.

Remarkable.

UPDATE:

Andrew Sullivan's coverage.

The Liberal blog Daily Kos aggregates coverage in its "Crisis in Iran Mothership."

The regime appears to be blocking Twitter and other social networks, and hunting down those with satellite phones. Not really a trait common to legitimately elected governments.

Ahmedinejad is claiming that the West is waging psychological warfare against Iran.

Perhaps. Or perhaps people everywhere who love freedom honestly think you're an asshole, and would like to see the Iranian people free from the Mullahs' tyranny.

UPDATE 102 am pst:

Pitney reports at HuffPo link, above, that there may be a move afoot to depose Khamenei -- that the election results may have represented a military coup -- and that this is the beginning of civil war.

Fresh pics here, at Tehran Live.

Oddly, Al Jazeera English seems to be downplaying these events. They are not buying the vote fraud story, and are painting the protests as something having to do with Northern Tehran hipsters -- and reporting that concerns about the legitimacy of the results stem from the U.S., Britain, and Canada ... only.

Judge Sotomayor In Context

2009-05-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

President Barack Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, has triggered the predictable controversy that every Supreme Court nominee triggers in this splintered age.

The Republican Party, of course, opposes Sotomayor as a matter of principle. That principle appears to be the principle of opposing whomever a Democratic president nominates to the Supreme Court (much as the Democrats would likely oppose any GOP court nominee). In this case, the Republicans began publicly sketching out their arguments against the nominee before there even was a nominee.

The chosen argument against the Nuyorican Sotomayor is that she is a "racist."

The Republicans point to a speech Sotomayor gave in May, 2001 -- in the pre-9/11 era -- at Berkeley, in which she said "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Of course, we have now seen this quote trumpeted back and forth across the various newsmedia, used as a bludgeon (along with a 3-judge panel decision that struck down the New Haven fire department's promotion exam for being racially biased to white males) to accuse Sotomayor of "racism."

What we haven't seen anywhere, even on news programs where you'd expect better, is the supposedly inflammatory quote in context -- so that we can actually understand what she meant.

Of course, we have to also understand the context in which the speech was given. According to the Times,

It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, a symposium issue entitled "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation"

So, the topic specifically under discussion was the under-representation of Americans of Latin culture (and, in the case of this speech, women) in the American judiciary. And in the speech, Sotomayor is specifically making the point that judicial nominees who are not both caucasian and male were blocked by Congress more often and for longer than caucasian male nominees to the bench:

In at least the last five years the majority of nominated judges the Senate delayed more than one year before confirming or never confirming were women or minorities. I need not remind this audience that Judge Paez of your home Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, has had the dubious distinction of having had his confirmation delayed the longest in Senate history. These figures demonstrate that there is a real and continuing need for Latino and Latina organizations and community groups throughout the country to exist and to continue their efforts of promoting women and men of all colors in their pursuit for equality in the judicial system.

See if you can guess who controlled Congress during those five years.

You have to also know what racism actually is: it is the use of social stratification by physical characteristics, as a means to achieve social control.

The Republicans are asking us to ignore that this speech was given seven years before President George Bush said that he never imagined he'd see an African American president in his lifetime -- that it was incomprehensible to him. It came as a complete surprise that it was even within the realm of the possible.

And Gingrich and Limbaugh, twins born from the same cosmic egg (stamped "1992" and forever lost in that peak year for identity politics in American thought) are pretending that there is no legitimate difference in perspective on matters of justice between a member of a historically oppressed ethnic group or sexual persuasion and that of the Anglo-Caucasian male who has dominated this nation's politics of power for its entire history, often by caveat of law.

And in this, they have no idea that as unpalatably as Sotomayor's single sentence reads in this Age of Obama (and I would bet that audio from the speech reveals that this was not a line spoken entirely in earnest but a laugh line delivered with a New Yorker's stiletto tongue set firmly in cheek), they are proving it accurate.

Who else but privileged multi-millionaires, historically advantaged for their skin tone and sexual organs and having dwelled for decades in or adjacent to the seat of power, would take mortal offense at the very mention of their monopoly?

Who else could see a well-educated federal judge pointing out institutional race bias and dare call that racism, but someone who has never tasted racism's business end?

That, joke or not, was Judge Sotomayor's point.

Don't take my word for it; read the speech yourself.

The Villain, President Cheney

2009-05-24T21:40:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

From analysis of Cheney's "national security speech" -- really an attempt to shield himself from prosecution for war crimes -- a few things become clear.

The first is that, assuming that Cheney wrote this speech and is acting as an independent operator (rather than as unleashed spokesman for the hapless Bush, who has been reduced to reminiscing to high school students about picking up dog feces), Cheney's entire worldview emanates from the trauma of being carried off to the bunker by the Secret Service on the morning of 9/11/01 -- while terrorists successfully attacked America on his watch.

If this is true, it represents a severe case of post traumatic stress disorder -- a potent brew of fear and guilt that resulted not only in such absurdities as the oft-derided (by Jon Stewart) "man sized safe" in the Vice President's office; the removal of Cheney's actual residence from the Google Earth mappng program; and the "undisclosed location" that was Cheney's official home for seven years -- but also such monstrosities as the legalization of torture at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

If one has the oft-derided (by Republican commentators) quality of empathy, the ability to see from another person's point of view, one might understand why Cheney is so angry. He believes that he did everything -- everything -- he could to save the country from another terrorist attack.

And he did. In seven years plus, no major terror attack (besides the anthrax letters that killed five and sickened seventeen Americans) occurred on U.S. soil. Unless you count the DC sniper shootings that killed thirteen people. Or the attacks on the soil of our NATO allies in London (2005, 37 killed, 700 injured) and Madrid (2004, 201 killed) in direct response to the Bush and Cheney administration's invasion of Iraq. No Americans were killed by terrorists (regardless that between a hundred thousand and a million Iraqis and nearly five thousand U.S. troops have died in the war in Iraq, with over 30,000 major injuries to U.S. troops alone.

Al Qaeda was kept on the run (Bin Laden and much of al Qaeda escaped the clutches of U.S. troops in Afghanistan as Bush and Cheney pulled U.S. Special Forces out, mid-battle, and sent them to Iraq to advance the coming war), its leadership command capability severed (though they did manage to assassinate Pakistani dissident Benazir Bhutto and commit major attacks in Mumbai and in Pakistan.) The Taliban was defeated, routed from power, and replaced in Afghanistan with the democratically-elected government of former Unocal executive Hamid Karzai (Although the Taliban actually advanced in Afghanistan -- Karzai's government controls little outside of Kabul -- and began the surprisingly-easy process of taking over Pakistan itself, advancing to within a hundred miles of the nuclear-armed capital.)

The Bush-Cheney foreign policy has left the world a much more dangerous place. They built a high wall around the "homeland" and fanned the flames of chaos outside it. But in Cheney's view, they staved off the destruction of an American city (well, unless you count New Orleans). And so how could Americans be so ungrateful (the bastard masses!) as to allow the evil, duplicitous Democrats to railroad him for committing war crimes -- to humiliate him again -- when all he did was everything he could -- everything! -- to keep America safe?

All of this presumes, of course, that Cheney was largely responsible for Bush's foreign policy, and that Cheney has not come out purposefully as a target to deflect blame from Dubble-yoo Dog-Doo.

In fact, Colin Powell's former deputy at the State Department, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, long considered to speak for Powell, confirmed last week that

Cheney was co-president. I'd go further than that and say that for national security issues and other critical issues Cheney was the President.

Who can blame Cheney for grabbing the reins? Bush was in over his head from the start. Certainly he was not qualified to defend the country. You leave the kid alone for one lousy month of summer vacation and look what happens. If you want something done right, you can hear the Vice President's wife telling him pillowside, you've got to do it yourself.

Of course, to accept even this, we must presume the best of intentions on his own part. That's what newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter did for the nearly eight years in which he led the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with legal oversight of the administration. (And what a fine job he did.)

And so we must forget, entirely, that Cheney moved from the Defense Department, where he pushed to outsource military functions to private contractors; then went to work as CEO of the biggest such military contractor-slash-oilfield services provider; then started a war from which that contractor-slash-oilfield services provider profited to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars -- and all the while, the "Vice" President took an annual paycheck from the corporation nearly equal to his pay as "Vice" President -- and sometimes more.

(The Congress and the mainstream news outlets, at least, appear to have forgotten.)

Matthew Alexander, a lead interrogator in Iraq, has written an essay at the Huffington Post, in which he tells us that it is common knowledge among Iraq vets that the foreign fighters did not come streaming into Iraq to kill U.S. troops until after the revelations of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib:

Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.

He further asserts us the most valuable information that interrogators harvested from both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah came before they were tortured. KSM admitted to planning the planes operation (aka the 9/11 attacks) before he was tortured. Zubaydah gave interrogators the name of Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomber" (who himself was later tortured until he was totally crushed and broken, and information from him inadmissible in U.S. court) before he was tortured. Alexander argues that the non-torture interrogation techniques may have yielded bin Laden's whereabouts; torture never would.

But if normal, long-effective interrogation techniques were working in spades, why resort to interrogation techniques that are just as likely to get the prisoners to say absolutely anything?

As it turns out, interrogators were ordered to turn to harsh techniques when the Bush administration was actively seeking a pretext to trigger an invasion of Iraq. At the request of the Vice President's office, interrogators asked "high value detainees" about links between Iraq and al Qaeda -- while torturing them.

The tactics, borrowed from the SERE training program which trains US troops to resist North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet torture tactics by actually using those tactics on them, pretty much guaranteed that the interrogatees would make false claims -- in this case, false "evidence" linking Iraq and al Qaeda. SERE officials even wrote to argue against the use of such tactics. No one listened.

Maybe Cheney and Bush really suspected an Iraq link to 9/11, and would stop at nothing -- nothing! -- to know the truth. Or maybe they wanted was false positives.

Here's Wilkerson again:

What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 -- well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion -- its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

We know from Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that the Administration planned to invade Iraq from its first Cabinet meeting in 2001 -- many months before 9/11.

According to CNN,

[author Ron] Suskind said O'Neill and other White House insiders gave him documents showing that in early 2001 the administration was already considering the use of force to oust Saddam, as well as planning for the aftermath.

"There are memos," Suskind told the network. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"

Suskind cited a Pentagon document titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which, he said, outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from ... 30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq."

In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting asked why Iraq should be invaded.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" O'Neill said.

Now we know that torturing al Qaeda operatives captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and elsewhere was one of those ways.

Bush and Cheney hijacked 9/11 and used it to divert national retaliatory war fervor from capturing bin Laden to invading Iraq -- for reasons that pre-date the 9/11 attacks -- including Iraq's oil.

They let bin Laden go free -- and used him as a bogeyman to scare Americans into giving Republicans control of Congress in 2002; supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and re-electing Bush Cheney in 2004.

It is the original sin from which most post-9/11/2001 Bush administration crimes emanate.

The invasion of Iraq has made the world is a more dangerous place. America's moral authority remains in tatters. The Taliban are within arm's reach of nuclear weapons. The bad guys remain free. Engaged in a propaganda war -- which is, by definition, what a war against terrorists is -- the Bush administration handed the enemy an incomprehensibly stupid and potent victory.

But look who's done well.

The United States remains addicted to oil. The global warming crisis has intensified as the world, "led" by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, declined to act. The ice caps began to disintegrate, opening up yet another potential boon for Cheney's Halliburton, as a newly thawed international Arctic needs roads built, wells drilled, and pipelines lain.

What's more, Iraq's oil industry has been successfully de-nationalized; Exxon and Chevron are back in action in Iraq, from which they had been expelled in the 1970s. Halliburton made billions rebuilding Iraqi oil infrastructure and providing often-shoddy support services for U.S. troops. And Cheney made over a million in pay from Halliburton while in office. He retains 433,000 Halliburton stock options, as well as a Halliburton retirement account.

Come to think of it, it's no surprise that Cheney opposes shutting down Guantanamo -- he hired his own company, Halliburton, to the tune of between $40 and $500 million, to build the damned prison there in the first place.

And he profited from the deal. In 2002, the year Halliburton got that contract, Cheney was paid nearly as much by Halliburton as by the American taxpayer:

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney filed their federal income tax return for 2002 today ... The wage and salary income reported on the tax return includes $190,134 in government salary for the Vice President. In addition, the tax return reports the payment of deferred compensation from Halliburton Company, in the amount of $162,392.

In 2005, when Halliburton received an additional $30 million contract to expand the prison, Halliburton paid Cheney more than the U.S. taxpayer did.

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney released their 2005 federal income tax return today ... The wage and salary income reported on the tax return includes the Vice President’s $205,031 government salary. In addition, the tax return reports the payment of deferred compensation from income earned in 1999 from Halliburton Company in the amount of $211,465.

He'll probably profit from its dismantling.

Cheney has argued for years that the annual salary represents portions of his annual salary for 1999, and that the salary is fixed, and not tied to Halliburton's fortunes. But a Congressional report found in 2003 that Cheney did, indeed, retain financial ties to the company, as they are defined by ethics guidelines that bar such ties, even as he pursued policies from which the company profited in the extreme.

This is pretty basic movie villainy.

Whether he was a man with good intentions who was traumatized and led astray by a damaged psyche, or a truly evil, heartless criminal mastermind who ordered that people be tortured (phony morality be damned!) to gain false evidence to use to sucker the American people into waging a war for oil and profit and is now trying to build an insanity defense, the man must be brought to justice. We paid for this madness -- don't we have the right to at least know which it is, incompetence or evil? We've waited eight years to find out.

If he had class, courage, or dignity at all, he would accept that the country has moved on, that the time for Red Alert mode, for harsh torture and shock and awe and dictatorship had passed -- and like other hard men in our culture who cross the line, he'd disappear. Like Batman or Spider-man or the Mission Impossible team. They accept the ultimate responsibility for their lawlessness. Knowing that no one has your back if you get caught is part of the job. Accepting that is what makes them heroes.

But instead of accepting responsibility for lawlessness that they insist was absolutely necessary to protect country -- which the American people would be inclined to excuse -- Cheney and Bush, cowards both, purposefully sought to make lawlessness legal in order to protect themselves from criminal prosecution in the future. That's how it spread to Abu Ghraib.

Now they deny that the spread of legalized torture was their fault. Support the troops? They are still handing the troops the bag.

If we allow this behavior to pass into history without an accounting, without accountability, it sends the message down the ages that you, too, can take over this country, break its laws, destroy its moral standing, violate the Constitution you swore under oath to uphold, do with it what you will -- and you will get away with it. Because the precedent has been set: when the President authorizes it, it's legal. That ain't Democracy. It's Dictatorship.

Cheney opposes a truth commission? Okay. Make it Congressional hearings and a Justice Department criminal probe. Put him in the dock and watch him snarl at the judge. It will make for good television. And that's a good enough reason in America, isn't it? Maybe he'll bang his shoe on the table.

Still, a hundred bucks says that if Cheney winds up on trial, he dies of a heart attack out on his favorite river in Wyoming before it ever begins. The local doc, an old hunting and fishing buddy, will sign the death certificate, and -- just like Kenny Boy Lay -- no one will ever see the body.

We've seen this movie before.

Dissident Cheney

2009-05-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

                       Mark Wilson / Getty Images

by Richard B. Simon

What does Dick Cheney want?

The former Vice President made a high-profile speech Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where his wife is a board member, essentially as a refutation of President Barack Obama's speech condemning torture and making the case for closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The two speeches could not have been a clearer illustration of the difference in policy, tone, and attitidue toward the American people between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Obama's speech was long and methodical and reasoned - typical of Obama's professorial style. His purpose was to herd members of Congress in both parties toward shutting Guantanamo. A Senate vote Wednesday yanked funding for closing the controversial facility, largely in response to Republican arguments that it is just too dangerous to have terrorists on U.S. soil, and in our justice system.

Obama made a pretty strong case that such fear is irrational: over 200 terrorists - including "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramsi Yousef - are already serving time in the U.S. prison system. No one, he said, has ever escaped from a U.S. Supermax (super-maximum security) prison.

More pointedly, Obama reminded his audience at the National Archives (chosen, apparently, for its authoritative-sounding natural reverb - as well as because it is where the Constitution is housed) that both parties last year chose candidates who abhorred torture and advocate the closing of Guantanamo.

Obama, as usual, spoke to the American people as if we were adults, capable of understanding and acting upon complex problems.

Cheney's tact was a bit different. He seemed ... defensive.

Despite the gymnastics of Congressional Republicans, who alternatingly abhor and embrace the policies of the Bush Administration, the national debate on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody in the War on Terror has seemed to settle on the conclusion that what the Bush Administration legalized as "enhanced interrogation techniques" amounted to torture - which is illegal, by both international and U.S. law.

Cheney has broken tradition in recent weeks to defend his administration's policies by attacking their aggressive rollback by Obama. Whether he is acting truly as a free agent, or still as the subterraneally quasi-official attack dog remains to be seen.

What is clear is that Cheney is trying to seize control of the debate, to reframe it in terms that don't cast him as a war criminal who would be liable to prosecution under international law.

Because that is exactly where this has been heading.

Cheney's speech is very clearly an attempt to re-frame the torture debate as "the criminalization of policy differences" in order to escape any sort of prosecution.

Cheney first attempts to establish his credibility by asserting that he has no hidden political agenda. He was never running for office, he is out of politics, and he is simply free, as a citizen, to speak his mind. He expects us to ignore the very real threat of personal legal jeopardy - in fact, his entire argument is based on us accepting that he is in no legal jeopardy, because all his actions were legal.

Cheney introduces his argument by saying:

The point is not to look backward. Now and for years to come, a lot rides on our president's understanding of the security policies that preceded him. And whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of the country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history.

So he is here to give us the Cheney version of "a truthful telling of history."

He gives some background on the U.S. response to terrorist incidents during Bill Clinton's tenure - culminating with the 9/11 attacks, nearly nine months into the Bush-Cheney term.

"From that moment forward," he says, "instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place."

It's a reasonable attack on the entire government response before 9/11. He continues by describing the threat spectrum the administration saw - including "the training camps in Afghanistan and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists." This is the same conflation of Hussein and al Qaeda, within the same sentence, that the administration used to lead the nation into Iraq.

"These are just a few of the problems we had on our hands," he continues. "And foremost on our minds was the prospect of the very worst coming to pass: a 9/11 with weapons of mass destruction."

He then gives a personal anecdote about his experience on 9/11, being whisked to a bunker beneath a White House believed to be about to be hit by an airplane. And he gives us an honest glimpse into the Bush White House mentality from then on:

"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities."

Cheney details Bush administration policies and successes, including dismantling Libya's nuclear program and breaking up the A.Q. Khan black market nuclear technology network.

Then he begins his attack.

So we're left to draw one of two conclusions, and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event, coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years and of the policies necessary to protect America in the years to come.

He presents a false dilemma - either we continue all of the Bush Cheney national security policies - including torture, pre-emptive wars, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens without warrants - or we treat 9/11 as a "one-off event" that is indicative of no further threat.

Obviously, in Cheney's worldview, conservatives are on one side, and liberals are on the other. There is, as he will assert later, "no middle ground" in what he is carefully framing as a political debate between the two ideologies.

Cheney next admits that the administration created legal framework in which intelligence operatives could interrogate detainees.

In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our administration gave intelligence officers the tools and the lawful authority they needed to gain vital information.

This seems to be an admission that the intelligence agents did not have the lawful authority "needed to gain vital information" - to use what Cheney will call "enhanced interrogation tactics" - until the administration gave it to them.

He then cites the Constitutional authority of the executive branch, as well as the Authorization of the Use of Military Force, the 2002 bill that gave the Bush Administration a blank check to do anything at all in pursuit of the terrorists:

We did not invent that authority. It's drawn from Article Two of the Constitution, and it was given specificity by Congress after 9/11 in a joint resolution authorizing all necessary and appropriate force to protect the American people.

One of Cheney's goals is to spread responsibility, then, to the Congress.

He then attacks the New York Times for doing journalism - for investigating and revealing Bush administration policies that violated the law - and moves directly into his defense of the interrogation practices in question:

In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.

He takes responsibility without actually taking responsibility:

In top-secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.

And states his core message:

The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.

Cheney ironically accuses the Obama administration of selectively declassifying documents, to tar the previous Administration with memos directing the interrogations from the White House, without releasing the documents that he has requested, which he says would detail not just the interrogation practices, but the answers they yielded. These answers, Cheney maintains, kept Americans safe.

The Obama administration has not denied this - but Obama has said that there are better, more effective ways to garner information from detainees and/or suspects, which do not sacrifice America's core values in the name of expedience.

Yet Cheney continues to work to frame the debate:

Over on the left wing of the president's party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they're after would be heard before a so-called truth commission. Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense and political opponents as criminals.

It's hard to imagine a worse precedent filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessor.

In Cheney's view, there is no validity in seeking to learn the truth about the Bush administration's policies. There is no valid reason for investigating whether the policies were lawful; and if not, how illegal policies such as torture were justified and legalized. In Cheney's view, the only reason anyone would want to have a "truth commission" (which in actuality has been proposed as an alternative to criminal proceedings, or to political hearings in Congress) is to "criminalize the policy decisions" of the Bush administration.

It is reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's and Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on the legitimacy of the Iraqi court and the War Crimes Tribunal, respectively.

And at this point in the speech - and increasingly with every iteration of the root "criminal," you start to sense that this man is afraid. He is trying to kill the very idea that what they did may have been illegal - and in so doing, to try to control the Bush-Cheney administration's legacy in history, which is fast being written to include torture, and then perhaps to keep himself out of prison.

He goes on to deflect the hot light onto lawyers and intelligence operators by asserting that a truth commission would impugn their service to country.

He threatens Obama by suggesting that an investigation of the interrogation methods will lead to the American people being left unprotected:

I would advise the administration to think very carefully about the course ahead. All the zeal that has been directed at the interrogations is utterly misplaced, and staying on that path will only lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people.

It is classic Cheney: do exactly what I want you to do, or risk another attack. This was the entire core message of the (effective) 2004 Bush Cheney re-election campaign.

Cheney spends some time talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged master plotter of the 9/11 attacks, focusing the torture debate on him:

It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl.

Cheney is basically saying it's not torture - and, anyway, we only did it to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The latter assertion is a seeming admission that, well, sure it's torture - but it's okay to use torture on guys like this who are obviously villains. It's an argument that comes up later.

More interestingly, Cheney says:

In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib with the top-secret program of enhanced interrogations.

At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulation and simple decency. For the harm they did to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice.

This charge mirrors the administration's own conflation of Iraq and al Qaeda.

But Cheney does not appear to recall that Major General Geoffrey Miller was tasked with exporting interrogation techniques from Guantanamo to Iraq, and specifically to Abu Ghraib".

Cheney is still trying to pin Abu Ghraib on the lowest men (and women) in the chain of command - but Charles Graner and Lynndie England always maintained that they had been asked - by CIA interrogators -- to "soften up" the prisoners for interrogation. This flows directly from the "Gitmoization" of the Abu Ghraib prison - the migration of the interrogation practices which Cheney admits to having purposefully made legal from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.

This is exactly why you don't legalize torture. In theory, you can torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Osama bin Laden all you want, and not many people would complain. But once you make it legal, it spreads beyond your control.

At Abu Ghraib, innocent men who were not hardened terrorists or even al Qaeda affiliates were subjected to this treatment, because Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon sought better intelligence on the insurgency.

Still, Cheney asserts that

it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.

"Those personnel," he continues, "were carefully chosen from within the CIA and were especially prepared to apply techniques within the boundaries of their training and the limits of the law.

And then Cheney admits what we've known all along: that the Bush administration specifically sought to define the line so that "interrogation" stopped just short of torture:

Torture was never permitted. And the methods were given careful legal review before they were approved. Interrogators had authoritative guidance on the line between toughness and torture, and they knew to stay on the right side of it.

Cheney goes on to impugn the motives of those who want to see the rule of law reinstated in this country, and some kind of accounting for lawless behavior.

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

There is no such thing, in Cheney's mind, as legitimate concern for the rule of law. Any outrage about the Bush administration's legalization of torture is "feigned" and based on a false story. Any indignation is "contrived" and all discussion of morality surrounding the mistreatment of detainees is "phony."

Perhaps he is referring to Pelosi and others who may have been briefed on, and at least tacitly approved policies such as waterboarding (though had the leaders of the minority party in Congress objected to these policies, they would have had no lever for airing or acting upon dissent; we know that such briefings were conducted under threat of prosecution - members of Congress were forbidden to discuss the meetings with anyone.)

But it is difficult to not read this as an assault on anyone who expresses outrage, indignation, or any moral qualms about the Bush administration's policies.

"I might add," Cheney continues, "that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about values.

He then concocts a straw man, and attacks an argument that no one has made publicly:

Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance.

When Cheney says "Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings," he appears to be responding directly to the Convention Against Torture, which states:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Then he comes back to his central attack:

[T]o call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe.

This is a guilt appeal (how dare you "libel" the dedicated professionals who save lives) coupled with a personal attack on Obama (for false "righteousness") that ends in the requisite fear appeal: Not only is this not torture, but we must continue to do it in the future, or we will be attacked again - and it will be all your fault.

Cheney goes on to say that Obama's attempts at political reconciliation are dangerous. He asserts that there is "no middle ground" in the War on Terrorism:

[I]n the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half-exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States; you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States.

It's Cheney's way, one hundred percent, or a nuclear attack. Moreover, any policy that falls short of the line just short of torture is a "half measure."

This is the definition of totalitarianism.

Cheney continues, attacking some perceived "political correctness" before discussing the closing of Guantanamo Bay, another policy with which he disagrees. Closing the prison camp, Cheney says, will please Europe, but it won't make Americans more safe.

He refutes the notion that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses were used as "recruitment tools" by al Qaeda, and mocks any such concern, again, as fainthearted concern about a loss of American values. Yet it has been largely Cheney allies such as Senator Lindsay Graham and General David Petraeus, who have spoken out against releasing photographic evidence of prisoner abuse, lest they provide propaganda tools for al Qaeda and inflame the international press.

In any event, Cheney is more interested in making an impression on terrorists than on our NATO allies. He argues that a debate over foreign policy - a debate which, after a national election largely repudiated his policies, he started - shows weakness to the terrorists. Therefore, of course, we must not debate whether Bush policies were legal - we must simply continue them.

He asserts again that if we are wise,

Instead of idly debating which political opponents to prosecute and punish, our attention will return to where it belongs: on the continuing threat of terrorist violence and on stopping the men who are planning it.

He again touts the lack of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil as evidence of the rightness of the policies, always bringing it back to this idea of criminalization:

After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven-and-a-half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.

Throughout the final quarter of the speech, Cheney attacks the very idea that the interrogation policies represent a failure to adhere to America's core values. And anyway, there is nothing more American than preventing Americans from being killed. And there is nothing morally wrong with treating suspected terrorists unpleasantly:

For all that we've lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims.

At its core, Cheney's argument is that the interrogation policies are not torture, and that they therefore were legal. He argues that anyone who says otherwise is merely expressing phony outrage in pursuit of a political goal: the criminalization of political opponents.

We might conclude that, as he claims, he is asserting all this in service to the national debate - but he does not believe we should even have a debate. He says he wants to speak truth to the historical record - yet he opposes a truth commission to find facts objectively. He wants us to believe that he is above politics - yet Cheney does not appear to believe that there is such a thing as legitimate moral indignation or outrage. There is only cynical political posturing, self-interest, and self-righteousness.

By Cheney's own reckoning, then, we must conclude that this speech is an attempt to confuse the public's sense of the debate by claiming that it is not about legalizing criminality but about criminalizing politics. Any investigation into Bush administration interrogation policy is tantamount to criminalizing political differences, rather than legitimate inquiry into whether political leaders acted criminally, whether in the public interest or not.

In addition, by tying Democrats to a policy (Obama's) that he forcefully asserts endangers the country (i.e., lead to another terrorist attack), while asserting that no motive outside of partisan gain is even fathomable, Cheney appears to be betting his own fortunes, and those of his party, on the success of the terrorists.

Finally, by making himself a forceful and very high-profile critic of the Obama administration, Cheney is trying to cast himself as a political dissident. This will allow Cheney - and his lawyers - to argue that any pursuit of legal charges or even investigation of Cheney is the result of political persecution for his vocal criticism.

It is a pre-emptive attack against an existential threat: the threat of prosecution for war crimes.

Killing Cap And Trade

2009-04-08T23:18:00.000-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

As yet another major, eons-old ice shelf crumbles off Antarctica, Senate Democrats who represent states with large oil and coal industries have moved to prevent long-needed legislative action to stave off catastrophic global warming.

Members of Congress, it turns out, often have no understanding of how the world actually works -- regardless of party. Just as clear is that a human will not believe that something is so if his or her paycheck depends on it not being so. That is as true for a politician as it is for an industrialist or his peon -- and the Fossil Barons control so much wealth, the politicians and peons are become one and the same.

And so, Republican and Democratic Senators from Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Alaska, Oklahoma and more, whose state industries rely on selling products that, when used correctly, cause mass species extinctions -- possibly including our own -- do not believe what is before their very eyes: the ice caps are crumbling into the sea.

The sea level is rising, if slowly. And if Anarctica sheds all its ice into the ocean, sea level will rise by 186 feet. That will take care of most major American cities, and displace hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of human beings around the globe. The widespread displacement that rising sea levels will cause leads to resource poverty; to starvation; to disease and calamity spreading in all directions; to war. We won't need to worry about Iran driving Israel into the sea. We'll have driven the sea into Israel, using only the carbon atom.

The U.S. has its first chance ever to pass meaningful legislation to regulate and begin to reduce the real amount of the most common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, emitted into the atmosphere every year in this country -- which has been, for decades, the world's largest emitter.

But, to these wise "moderate" women and men in the Senate, preventing global cataclysm remains a distant second, if not third, fourth, or twelfth place, behind protecting profits and jobs in their home state oil and coal industries.

What they are opposing, on economic grounds, is a cap and trade system to reduce the carbon emissions that are causing the planet to overheat.

A cap and trade system seems complex -- but it is not. Every business entity that emits CO2 as part of its ordinary operations receives, from the government, a credit -- permission to emit X amount of CO2, for the year. If the business -- say, a coal fired power plant -- emits more than X amount in a year, the plant has two options: reduce emissions by making technological improvements, or purchase credits from another entity that does not need the entire allotment, such as one that chosen to refit already.

This creates a market for industrial carbon credits (not to be confused with carbon offsets).

Every year, the bar is lowered: the amount of CO2 permitted is decreased. And each credit, as the supply of them decreases, is worth more and more money.

A business that eliminates its CO2 emissions altogether profits by selling its credits -- the right to pollute X amount of carbon in a given year -- on the ever-tightening carbon credits market.

Carbon-intensive businesses can upgrade and update their equipment on a pace that makes the most sense for their bottom lines, which is what companies do. But they can't do nothing.

They can put off major plant upgrades for as long as it makes sense to buy credits, rather than new technology. A power plant can save and plan for several years toward plant upgrades to reduce emissions, while buying time in the form of carbon credits.

This is a market-based, capitalistic solution, and it works; we have done this since the 1990s with sulfur oxides emitted by midwest power plants and factories, which had been causing acid rain deposition, killing northeast lake ecosystems. Cap and trade also did not, as its opponents invariably decried, adversely affect the economy.

Friedman favors a carbon tax. That is a viable option, too, which would force us all to consider the cost of using the atmosphere as a garbage dump, every time we add to it. It is more direct, and even less complex.

These are not "command-and-control" solutions. They are all based on the combination of smart regulation and market forces. It's a matter of shaping the market.

We should empathize with fossil state senators wanting to protect their constituents' jobs in a time of national economic crisis -- and more so with those constituents, who need work. But if we found out that we were growing a food crop that poisoned our children, guaranteeing certain premature death, would we continue to allow that crop into our food supply, merely to protect the jobs of those farmers and farm hands who tend it? Or would we eliminate the poison crop, and help retrain those hands to find work elsewhere? Or, better yet, help those farmers transition to a new crop?

Global warming is a global problem, where for many decades, those who have not benefited from industrialization have been forced to bear the externalized costs of industrial business, the prices that neither the buyer nor the seller has to pay, because they are passed on to some other entity, external to the transaction. A sucker, in other words -- the poor suckers into whose rivers, whose atmosphere our factories shit. As in, we don't have to pay to get rid of our industrial waste. We'll just dump it into the river, and some other sucker will clean it up down the road, down stream, down the generations.

For example, when I buy a gallon of gasoline, I pay once at the pump, again in my income taxes for industry subsidies, again when taxpayers are forced to clean up environmental damage, and again (and again and again) when taxpayers must reimburse China (with interest) what we borrowed to fund the Iraq War.

For obvious reasons, the oil companies are not signing on to the new green revolution -- they have learned over time that they have so much money, they can ride out whatever fickle storms wash across public opinion. They are still banking on Americans moving beyond concern about global warming. They are planning their operations to drill under the extinct polar ice caps.

Chevron is running ads that air every day on PBS, at the beginning and end of the News Hour -- a repetition tactic, repeating the same message, day after day after day, at three o'clock and four o'clock, at six o'clock and seven. It is a desperate and manipulative propaganda campaign, which uses powerful emotional appeals -- pictures of babies, for example, people jogging, and people in ethnic garb -- to re-frame the problem as merely one of supply -- in Chevron's eyes, the problem is that there's not enough energy to meet the demand of growing global population.

The problem is merely one of finding enough energy, you see -- and that's why it will take "all forms of energy" to meet the needs of the future -- especially oil.

The ads are designed to get us to forget all about global warming. In this iteration, they'd rather frame the Iraq War as having to do with oil than even mention that their product causes global catastrophe and extinction. Never mind the consequences of continuing to burn oil into the atmosphere "for the foreseeable future" -- the period of time in which we'll still use oil, according to Chevron. Some other sucker will pay the price.

Of course, the ultimate sucker is all of us. For who will pay the price of evacuating Manhattan to higher ground, to relocating Floridians into the Ozarks? Who will pay to guard the borders against the starving, vengeful throngs of desperate humanity? Hint: not Chevron.

We have long ignored the consequences because they are felt elsewhere -- but, Senator Landrieu of Louisiana, how many millions of deaths by drowning in strengthened hurricanes and monsoons, how many ruined crops in desertified breadbaskets will it take before another set of airplanes or bombs comes crashing into our capital cities in protest? Senator Lincoln of Arkansas, how many lives displaced or destroyed by catastrophic global warming, sea level rise, flooding, megastorms, ecosystem collapse, disease, and resource war is a coal miner's meager paycheck worth?

The purpose of adding a carbon tax or using cap and trade is to internalize the externalities -- to include the actual costs of burning carbon into the atmosphere into the actual price of the carbon-based fuels.

So, like, if you were to wage war to keep the oil flowing to your SUV truck, you'd pay for it at the pump, rather than in your income taxes -- or putting it on the national credit card, as we've been doing since 2002.

And if you were going to use a fuel that meant that you would have to pay to someday move Manhattan to higher ground in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe you'd do well to include the cost of the eventual move in the price of the fuel. It's actually cheaper to pay it up front.

Still, once you had to start paying that price -- the actual price -- day after day after day after day after day, just to get to work, maybe you'd think harder about getting to work some other way.

It Was Torture

2009-03-16T21:14:00.001-07:00

by Richard B. Simon

Allow me first to come clean.

When I heard that U.S. troops had captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I fantasized about his torture.

So I am complicit. This is a democracy. I shouldn't expect its leaders to be any better than I, nor any smarter, or any wiser.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is essentially the arbiter of war crimes. Red Cross observers are allowed to examine a host country's detention facilities, to check on the status of the prisoners, and issue report back to that nation's government.

The report back to the Bush Administration on the treatment of prisoners in the "War on Terror," leaked to author Mark Danner, who reports on the report in the New York Review of Books, ruled that the treatment amounted to "torture."

Torture is illegal, under international law, and under United States law.

The Bush Administration made it "legal" -- partly by claiming for the executive branch a dictatorship, wherein anything goes, so long as the President wills it.

Regardless of the travesty done to U.S. law, this means that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, perhaps John Ashcroft, and all other top officials who came up with the Bush Administration's interrogation policies appear to be guilty of international war crimes.

If the were any other country, we'd denounce its rulers, call them demented villains, drag them into court. Demand regime change. Now we know for certain why the Bush Administration wouldn't join the International War Crimes Tribunal.

I will never in my life forget the Thanksgiving -- a handful of years ago -- when I announced to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and their inlaws that the Bush Administration and its Republican Party would be remembered by history in the same breath as Nazis of Germany and the Communists of the Soviet Union. You could hear their jaws hit the floor.

All except my grandfather. He knew. He actually served in Italy, fought the fascists up close. He knows from dictatorship. My uncle later complained that my Granfather pretended to spit at his big-screen television set -- "Ptui!" -- when Bush appeared therein, as if this were some unfathomably insane response.

You've heard in this space for a long time that the United States was torturing detainees; that that torture was not limited only to al Qaeda suspects, nut that it had been exported to Iraq, to Abu Ghraib.

And so my good brother Emilio sends me a brilliant op-ed by the sometimes weaselly political shill Paul Begala, that discussed Bush lawyer John Yoo's approval of the crushing of a terrorist suspect's child's testicles -- and says "this reminded me of you."

Because over the weekend, up pops the noble gentlemen Dick Cheney, who can't help but attack the fledgling Obama Administration as it attempts to remantle the country.

Of course, we should have known that the Bushists, after breaking all of America's moral codes, would not be able to help but defy precedent and attack its successors during a national crisis.

No one from the Democratic Party, and no one from the Clinton Administration, leapt up to attack Bush and Cheney's handling of 9/11. But the Bushists emerge from their torpor to raise doubts about Obama's policies -- particularly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially on the handling of detainees.

That's because they know, in what's left of their hearts, that in a just world, the gallows awaits them, just like it awaited Saddam.

Dick Cheney and George Bush have killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq.

They have presided over rape rooms and tortures.

They have devastated your country's economy, attacked their own people, and courted environmental disaster on behalf of your corporate allies.

They destroyed the rule of law in a country founded solely on the rule of law.

They couldn't help it. They would do it again. It was the only choice, you see.

George Orwell writes

[W]hen the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

We had to stay in Iraq forever, Cheney has argued for years, because if we were to leave, bin Laden would think we are weak.

And here comes Cheney, unaware that he is bin Laden to Obama's Bush.

Every time bin Laden popped up with a new tape, he told us that we must do the exact opposite of what the Bush Administration was doing -- essentially reenforcing Bush's arguments that we needed to "stay the course." (The disastrous course, which would have continued unimpeded had the Democrats not taken control of Congress in 2006. Only then did Bush sack Rumsfeld and institute "the surge." Until that "accountability moment," everything had gone just exactly perfectly.)

The new, self-styled boogeyman is Cheney, popping up once a month, telling us that Obama's rollback of the Bush Cheney lawlessness will endanger America. Ignoring that torture and asinine detention policies have led ex-Guantanamo detaineed to come back as Taliban commanders and suicide bombers. Would these guys have been returned to the battlefield if they'd been detained as simple prisoners of war, rather than in the lawless Bush "War on Terror" detention system?

No. They would still be in detention, until bin Laden formally surrenders.

But we would not have been able to torture them.

In the same week, Ari Fleischer begins the parade of Bushist thugs crawling out from under their rocks, where they are unemployed (the return of poetic justice), untouchable by decent folks running clean operations, arguing the same.

And now Cheney is arguing that the damage done to the economy was not Bush's fault, but the result of 9/11, essentially handing bin Laden the propaganda victory he sought from the beginning -- to bankrupt the U.S. as the mujahedin did the U.S.S.R.

What has become clear in recent months is the psychopathology of the Bushists.

Bush and Cheney were supposed to be a gang of toughs, oil wildcatters from Wyoming and Tejas, the kinds of places you don't want to be caught after dark if you're queer or brown or funny-looking, or you have long hair or funny clothes, or you drink strong coffee or drive a car built in Scandinavia.

9/11 happened on their watch.

The terrorists aimed a plane for the White House.

They missed on the latter count, but Cheney and Bush were obviously shaken, and remained so. They swore this would never happen again, if they had to destroy the country themselves to prevent bin Laden from humiliating them again.

And that's what they did. The United States suffered seven and a third long long years the ravages of governance by men and women wracked with post traumatic stress disorder.

It's no way to run a country.

But now that Bushism has been totally discredited, even by their own ideological allies, who enabled their every single move, and threw the system of checks and balances out the window (just listen to Republican Senators Arlen Specter and John Cornyn, complaining that Vermont Senator Leahy's Truth Commission to investigate terror War lawlessness would be an abdication of Congress' oversight function, as if they hadn't abdicated it nearly a decade ago) they're back, trying to salvage a legacy that they don't seem to even understand is in total shambles, to save themselves from the harsh verdict of the historians, who rank Bush 36th out of 42 former Presidents.

But we now know that the arbiter of war crimes found that the leaders of our democracy engaged in them. Just like Milosevich, just like Saddam, just like Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini and Bashir and Stalin and the worst of history's actors. And just like all of them, they did it in the name of Protecting the Homeland.

This is a democracy. We are responsible. Our leaders represent us. We choose them. We must bring them to justice, or else how are we any better from Ahmedinejad who says that the Holocaust never happened?

Leahy's Commission is a way to remove it from the Republican vs. Democrat frame. The Republicans don't want that, because then they can't assert that for every truth ("The Bush Administration instituted torture"), there is an equal and opposite Republican version ("it's not torture if we have a piece of paper from Bush and Cheney's personal lawyers that say it isn't").

The Bushists are reemerging to muddy the ethical waters. It's what they do best -- disseminate misinformation and disinformation, to confuse the electorate.

Just as America is beginning to get its moral footing, they seek to pull the rug out, to protect their own asses.

What else is new?

Apocalypse, Now

2009-03-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

  London, 2070? (Image: Christopher Hudson, from The Daily
  Mail UK)

The news trickles in from the international conference on global climate change in Copenhagen this week -- and it ain't good.

The reality is as bad as the worst-case scenarios of the climate models we've been looking at over the last several decades.

That means widespread catastrophe, impending.

No kidding.

We need urgent, urgent action -- and, thanks to the decade of inaction by the climate criminal Bush, the Exxon stooge, it is too late to stave off catastrophic global heating (as James Lovelock calls it.)

The question that remains is, can we stop emitting carbon; start actually removing carbon and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; move humans from coastal areas and fortify or rebuild coastal cities quickly enough to prevent the displacement of hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of human beings, and the ensuing massive global disruption (a.k.a. "war") that massive populations on the move will mean?

Lovelock believes that for the species to actually survive the pending heat age, we will have to move to the Arctic. Not all of us, mind you -- most of us will die, and so will our offspring.

You start to understand why the extraordinarily wealthy have engineered the most massive redistribution of wealth, upward, in human history. Certainly the Bush family will be able to stake its claim on Arctic land and hire its own private army of mercenaries for protection.

What's worse is that "global dimming" may mean that if we stop emitting all pollution tomorrow, the sunlight (and heat) that has been blocked by particulate pollution may actually exacerbate global heating.

So much for the smartest animal.

We need to deal, people. Hard core. No more fucking around.

Nuclear power, solar, tides, wind. Get out of the car. Stop using so much electricity.

Elect only politicians that get it. Ignore the ones that don't. They're only muddying the waters because A. they don't understand the science or B. they are sucking at the golden teat of the energy industries, or C. all of the above.

They're still trying to convince you that tacking 3-4% onto the tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans is the most massive and egregious redistribution of wealth in history. How about taking the health, welfare, and well-being of the entire human race, every coastal city, every productive agricultural belt and sacrificing them to the oil companies, so they can look for oil under where the ice caps used to be?

Finally, let's hang George Bush from a lamp-post. The full Saddam.

Do you get it yet? He sold out the human race for a few million silver pieces from Exxon.

Exactly What Is A Volcano And Why Are We Spending $140 Million To Monitor It?

2009-02-24T23:58:00.000-08:00

                               (Image: CNN.com)

by Richard B. Simon

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who delivered the Republicans' response to Obama's address to Congress, asked a question, phrased in a familiar pattern.

You may recall that, last week, GOP chairman Michael Steele asked "exactly what is a fish passage barrier" and wondered, aloud, how removing said barrier would provide economic stimulus.

It's a technique that the Republicans use to mock programs on which Democrats in Congress want to spend your tax money -- an attempt to make the Democrats look silly and porky.

The irony is that modern Republicans tend to criticize expenditures on science that they don't understand, and therefore end up looking foolish themselves -- such as John McCain mocking the study of grizzly bear populations, which is mandated by law under the Endangered Species Act.

Or Steele, demonstrating his fundamental lack of understanding about what natural resources are, and what their connection is to the economy.

It reminded me a lot of a college housemate, a guy who grew up in Long Island City, in Queens. One spring, when our well ran dry (due to a valve control problem with the washing machine), he wondered who was going to call the water guy to come fill it up again.

Tonight, Jindal followed the same pattern, and wondered -- out loud:

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a 'magnetic levitation' line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.

It's willful ignorance, an appeal whose effectiveness is predicated on the presumed ignorance of the audience.

The $300 million to "buy new cars for the government" is designed to give Detroit a kick in the ass toward building low-emissions, efficient vehicles, and replace government gas-guzzlers with, say, hybrids. This is how the federal government primes the pump -- guaranteeing economies of scale that convince an industry that it is worth the investment in "retooling", because the feds are going to prime the pump with a purchase.

The high speed rail corridor in question could link Los Angeles to Las Vegas, taking millions of cars per year off I-10 and I-15, and lightening air traffic. This is a project that could see thousands of workers hired to complete a massive infrastructure project that has a serious eye to getting us off of oil.

But $140,000,000 is a lot of money -- for that kind of bread, we could fund the war in Iraq for six hours. So let's get to the bottom of this volcano business.

So to speak.

Governor Jindal, you may not have any volcanoes in Louisiana, but the United States has volcanoes in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. You might recall, when you were a child, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in Washington. A massive volcanic caldera underlies Yellowstone National Park. Have you been there? That's what makes the hot, bubbly water come out of the ground. If the caldera were to blow, it could take out a good chunk of North America. It would be the type of event that some scientists believe caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

So, you know, that might be something you might want to keep an eye on -- or, to use a scientific term, to "monitor."

The people who monitor volcanoes, Bobby, are called "scientists" -- "volcanologists", to be precise.

They are geologists, geophysicists, people who actually understand how the earth works.

One of my oldest friends is a volcanologist who spent some time working for the Federal Government, Bobby. I know that that, to you, that means he's not doing anything worthwhile, but hear me out.

Not too long ago, my friend spent some time studying a place in Nevada called "Yucca Mountain."

Yucca Mountain is in a "volcanic field." That means that someday, rock that is so hot it is liquid may explode out of it, like -- well, like the model volcanoes you've probably seen in Las Vegas, and at Disneyland. Except real. Like Mount Saint Helens.

The funny thing, Bobby, is that while you derided other proposals in the stimulus plan designed to reduce the amount of energy that Americans use -- efficient new vehicles for the government, for example, and mag-lev trains that run on electricity and displace automobiles (and therefore the need to spend money on maintaining asphalt in the desert) -- you also expressed your support for nuclear power.

The United States uses nuclear power, but has nowhere to put nuclear waste -- that's toxic, radioactive metal produced as garbage when you use nuclear power. So the United States has built a nuclear waste repository -- a place to put that waste -- inside Yucca Mountain.

Which, again, is basically a dormant volcano.

So, one thing that "volcano monitoring" means is making sure that the nuclear waste that you want to produce, and which will then by definition wind up in Yucca Mountain, does not wind up spread all over Las Vegas, Disneyland, and much of the globe, really, when Yucca Mountain explodes.

There's about a 1/1000-1/10,000 chance of this in the next 10,000 years -- that's a thumbs-down risk assessment from geologists (the ones who "monitor volcanoes"), thumbs-up from your man George Bush and his Energy Secretary, Spencer "GM's man in Congress" Abraham.

I'll remind you, because you seem to have forgotten: Bush was the guy running the Federal Government whose failure to deal with Hurricane Katrina you bemoaned in your speech on why "government" is the problem to all our solutions. Even as you praised the local Sheriff -- who happens to work for ... the government. And it was your party's "shrink the federal government to where it can be drowned in the bathtub" tax policy that led New Orleans to be drowned in the bathtub, mission accomplished. Same policy you espoused tonight, come to think of it.

On a side note, "volcano monitoring" is also designed to prevent the devastation of life and property in case, say, Mount Rainier erupts and takes out half of Seattle. You see, when you monitor volcanoes, you know -- in advance -- when they're going to erupt. Sort of like with a hurricane.

Except, optimally you have a government in place that believes that government actually has a job to do, and actually acts on the warnings and gets the people out of the way.

Governor Jindal?

Maybe you should go back and get one of those years of community college study that Obama recommended for all Americans.

It is a valid question to ask why funding for monitoring volcanoes is in the economic stimulus plan. I'd argue that jobs as really, really smart scientists are jobs -- even though Michael Steele would say they're not really "jobs" -- they're just "work." But volcanologists tend to hire research assistants. They also travel, buy equipment, and spend money on food and gear. They're just like small businesses. It's just that they're not necessarily in the private sector. They're in the education sector.

No government spending ever, Steele says, created a job. I guess what that means is that all the educators who work at public institutions don't have real "jobs" -- we just do a shit-ton of work.

As a "part-time" college professor who works full-time for half the pay my colleagues get, I say Amen to that, brother.

After eight years of Bushism, it's hard out there for a PhD. And it's even harder for an MFA.

But, man, are you really so ignorant as to not know what it means to monitor a volcano, or why that might be important, or why it might have economic consequences?

Or do you just have to pretend to be that ignorant so the bastards let you into the Country Club?

Seriously.

Here's the entire text of Jindal's speech.

Here's what Obama had to say.

Two "gifted politicians," same topic, same night.

Read both.

Ask this question: does the speech appeal to your intelligence or insult it?

Exactly What Is A Fish Passage Barrier?

2009-02-09T08:59:00.000-08:00

   1. Before    2. After   3. Ignorant

by Richard B. Simon
February 9, 2009

Michael Steele, the new Chairman of the Republican Party, has delivered the Republican Saturday address, criticising the economic stimulus package that Obama and the Democrats are trying to shepherd through Congress.

Steele argues that tax cuts, not spending, are the only way to stimulate the economy. In order to convince the American people that the Democrats' proposals are, on their face, ridiculous (a popular tactic in Congress), he picks out a few items in the stimulus package which might sound silly to the untrained ear:

Democrats in Congress want a one-trillion dollar spending bill. You've heard about the pork-barrel programs they want to fund... 45 million dollars for ATV trails and removal of fish passage barriers is one that caught my eye. Exactly what is a fish passage barrier and why does it cost 45 million dollars to stimulate the economy with it?

Allow me to explain.

A "fish passage barrier" is a dam.

When you remove the dam, the fish -- salmon -- are able to get upstream to spawn.

When fish are able to spawn, they can then grow up and be caught by fishermen.

The fishermen sell the salmon to stores. Stimulus.

The stores sell the salmon to restaurants. Stimulus.

The restaurants sell the salmon to diners. Stimulus.

The scrap is sold to pet food manufacturers and fertilizer manufacturers. Stimulus.

The pet food is sold to stores. Stimulus.

The fertilizer is sold to stores. Stimulus.

The fertilizer is sold to farmers. Stimulus.

The pet stores sell the fertilizer to customers. Stimulus.

Nurseries sell the fertilizer to customers. Stimulus.

Nurseries use the fertilizer to grow plants to sell to customers. Stimulus.

Nurseries sell the fertilizer to landscapers. Stimulus.

Landscapers sell their services to clients. Stimulus.

Farmers use the fertilizer to grow crops. Stimulus.

Farmers sell the fruit of their crops to stores -- and to food processors. Stimulus.

Food processors sell their food to stores. Stimulus.

Stores sell the food to customers. Stimulus.

Stores sell the crops to restaurants. Stimulus.

Stores sell the processed food to restaurants. Stimulus.

Restaurants sell the food to customers. Stimulus.

Currently, the west coast salmon fishery is shut down -- at a loss of $100 million per year -- because there are too few salmon, because of the barriers to spawning, also known as reproduction.

That, Mr. Steele, is when two mature salmon make thousands of baby salmon.

If you remove the fish barriers, more salmon are born, and mature. Each salmon that is caught spreads its effect throughout the economy -- with value added at every step.

This is why $45 million to remove "fish passage barriers" is a great way to stimulate the American economy.

That 45 million will provide paying jobs for:

1. laborers to remove the dams
2. fishermen
3. seafood peddlers
4. restaurateurs
5. farmers
6. food processors and packagers
7. grocers
8. nurseries
9. landscapers
10. the truckers who move all this American product from place to place
11. and more ...

The fishermen alone make $100 million a year selling salmon.

That is how $45 million spent on removing "fish passage barriers" will act as stimulus -- and stimulus very well-spent.

Michael Steele, you don't know what you're talking about.

Steele's attempt at mockery is pretty much the epitome of ignorance -- the perfect symbol for a fundamental lack of understanding of how things work among the people who have controlled the government for decades.

Steele's Republicans are trying to force the removal of many similar projects from the stimulus package -- and they are succeeding. Some pretty key items -- with comparably key economic effects -- have been, quite worrisohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmely, killed or cut.

Politicians who oppose spending money on repairing the environment as "pork barrel spending" do not appear to understand that air, water, and soil are the basic natural resources upon which our entire economy is built.

The Republican plan appears to be to cut taxes for the guy who owns the grocery chain, and hope that he uses the money to hire people. To sell what, they don't say.

Politicians who have not got the faintest idea of the connection between the natural environment and the economy have no business nitpicking the first major legislation of the New Green Deal.

Clearly, they know not what they do.

You Got To Move

2009-02-01T22:22:00.000-08:00

Neil Young’s Auto Answer

  Neil Young, behind the wheel of the Linc Volt, wants you
  to know that fuel efficient cars can be mean as well
  as green. (Image: KAKE-TV)

by Richard B. Simon
February 2, 2009

Neil Young’s classic tune “Long May You Run” is often misread as a love song with an extended automotive metaphor. It’s pretty literal, though – an ode to a car. The rock legend is a prolific songwriter, guitarslinger, and agitator. He’s also a collector of old Detroit behemoths, but in this age of global warming and oil war, he’s grown disillusioned with the gas-guzzlers about which he still fondly sings. He’s sold off most of his collection, save for a 1959 Lincoln Continental, which he has gutted and renamed the LincVolt.

Young, engineers Jonathan Goodwin and Uli Krueger, and filmmaker/ creative co-conspirator Larry “L.A.” Johnson, have been working to transform the 2 ½ -ton Lincoln into a Self-Charging Electric Vehicle – a car that is free from what Young calls the monster claw of the refueling station. The idea is to run an ultra-efficient electric motor on a hybrid fuel system, and can generate enough electricity from a small amount of biofuel that the car can charge its own batteries – and, someday, power a home. They’re trying to win the Automotive X-Prize.

Not only has the LincVolt become a demonstration vehicle for wild new technologies that might use water or compressed air for fuel – the team’s website, lincvolt.com, is fast becoming a clearinghouse for innovation, a forum where anyone with an idea can chime in. It’s open source automotive innovation, inspired by the Internet age.

As work on the car continues, fans and potential collaborators can watch a live video feed online from the Wichita, Kansas garage where it’s all been going down – as well as archived news reports on the LincVolt’s progress.

Young’s also been blogging – at lincvolt.com and at the Huffington Post – about the troubled U.S. auto industry. As the “big three” clamored this fall for tens of billions of dollars in bailouts, and aid to help them retool their factories to build more efficient cars, Young suggested that without any new tooling, the automakers could use their existing factories to build complete vehicles – without engines or transmissions – to sell to innovators (like Linc Volt) who are already pioneering low-fuel propulsion systems. Young calls the empty-hooded boxes “Transition Rollers” – cars that are ready to roll, to help make the transition to whatever comes next.

The idea is not entirely new. My father, with a partner, opened an electric car dealership in about 1980. The Solargen cars were AMC Concord station wagons fitted with electric motors, and a cargo area full of batteries. They didn’t have much range – only about 32 miles on a 12-hour charge. A long-anticipated battery breakthrough never came. As collective memory of the OPEC oil embargo faded, cheap gas and an anti-government ideology led the new President, Ronald Reagan, to kill federal funding for alternative energy research. Solargen’s chief, Steve Romer, unsuccessfully filed an antitrust suit against GM and AMC, claiming that the automakers had colluded to keep him out of the market. With the company dead in the water, Romer took investors’ money and ran.

The story is typical of the cycle of sordid death and rebirth of electric cars in America.

There’s so much money in the auto and energy industries that their constituent corporations wield enormous political clout. That allows them to strangle potential competitors in the cradle. When an old paradigm has consolidated so much power that innovative new paradigms are permanently prevented from emerging, then society has a serious problem. Old industry jobs disappear, and new industries can’t spring up to replace them. It’s one reason our economy is currently disintegrating.

That’s the dynamic that Neil Young hopes to change.

Young is preparing to drive the LincVolt across the country to Washington, D.C., this month. He’s filming a documentary, and will be updating the vehicle’s status – mileage, battery power, speed, and location – live at lincvolt.com. Young wants to prove to lawmakers that Detroit is playing cute when it argues that fuel-efficient cars must necessarily be small, light, and unsafe. It’s an argument we’ve seen resurface since the Obama administration signalled it would likely grant California an EPA waiver that allows it to set vehicular carbon dioxide emissions standards.

If a 2 ½-ton, 19 ½ foot long 1959 Lincoln Continental can be an ultra-green, high-torque hybrid, then why not a Camaro or an F-150?
___________________________

I’d been wanting to sit down and talk politics with Neil Young since I heard his brilliant 2003 concept record Greendale, a coastal California family saga that dug at the Bush administration’s ties with the crooked energy trader Enron, and critiqued a broken media climate, and the slick corporate propaganda machine that had become a war-megaphone.

I got my chance last June, when we met a restaurant in the dusty coast range redwood forest south of San Francisco, to talk about his Iraq war/Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young concert documentary CSNY: Déjà Vu for a feature in Relix (Sept./Oct. 2008). He was even more revved about the LincVolt, pacing back and forth on the cell phone, listening to the test numbers come in from the proving track in Wichita.

It was the day that Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich had introduced articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney in Congress, for selling the invasion of Iraq on false premises. Young had called for Bush’s impeachment on his 2006 album Living With War. He wanted Kucinich’s text posted immediately to neilyoung.com.

The war, the car, the music -- it was all part of the same fight.

__________________________________________________

RICHARD B. SIMON: You call it for Obama pretty early ... that song really resonates with me, “Looking for a Leader.” I always see Obama riding into town like the guy in “Blazing Saddles.”

NEIL YOUNG: Oh, yeah. (Laughs.) Well, let’s hope he can keep riding. Let’s hope he makes it, because I think the country’s ready for him. The world is happy about it. They’re very happy about it. I mean, everybody in the world thinks it’s great that a black man is running for President of the United States – and just narrowly beat out a woman. That’s a big turn, that’s a big change.

RICHARD B. SIMON: That’s the America that the myth is about. That we all think it’s about ...

NEIL YOUNG: That’s right, that’s right.

RICHARD B. SIMON: ... and everyone else in the world wants it to be about, and we all want it to be about.

NEIL YOUNG: We do.

RICHARD B. SIMON: And sometimes it ain’t. We always are trying to realign ...

NEIL YOUNG: We’ve had a lot of it ain’t. The pendulum has gone as far as it can go in the wrong direction. And it’s now, it’s at that moment (makes a motion with his hand of a pendulum hanging at the apex of its swing, vibrating with potential energy), just getting ready to come back. And it’s gonna be big. It’s gonna be the age of innovation. We’re gonna be just coming up with all kinds of new shit. It’s gonna be a great time for this country. This next maybe twelve to fourteen years, something like that, we’re going to be thinking of things, we’re gonna replace oil, we’re gonna come up with all kinds of new ways of doing things that are cleaner, and the rest of the -- we’re gonna show, we created the problem, we’re gonna solve it. That’s what I think.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Well, you’re starting to work towards that, too, with the LincVolt.

NEIL YOUNG: Hopefully. That’s the goal. And we’re one of many. Many people working on the same trip.

                                     (Photo: L.A. Johnson)

RICHARD B. SIMON: How did you get involved with trying to build an electric car?

NEIL YOUNG: I had a collection of 50s cars that I really liked. A few years ago, I found myself not wanting to drive them – very much because they were big polluters. And I’m going, I love these things! They make me feel real good, but I don’t want to use them. They’re, like, nostalgic. And then I thought, well, I’m gonna sell ‘em, cause I don’t know what to do with them. And then I looked at this one big Lincoln that I just love. I looked at it and said, ‘you’re my candidate. We’re gonna make you green as can be. You’re gonna be the smartest damn car anybody ever saw. And I’m gonna sell all these other cars to get the money to make you into the best, greenest, hugest fuckin’ piece of engineering.’ So that’s what we’re trying to do – build a car that can power your house, and power itself, and what it doesn’t use goes into the grid. And if everybody had a car like that, and a house that had that technology in it, we’d have distributed power, instead of centralized power, and we’d be into a new age.

RICHARD B. SIMON: I’ve been thinking that for a while, with the fuel cell car. And Larry [Johnson] was telling me that this is hydrogen, but it doesn’t [use a] fuel cell.

NEIL YOUNG: Part of it conceivably will be hydrogen, but it’s not a fuel cell. The problem with the fuel cell is that it goes against the mission of the project, which is to eliminate roadside refueling. Eliminating roadside refueling means that the fuel cell – basically because the fuel cell is just more of the same, cause it’ll never replace, totally, gasoline, because they’ll blend the hydrogen and the gasoline. That technology is already there. So it will be a slow thing, where they ramp down gasoline, and have hydrogen – but who’s in control? The energy companies, still in control. It’s the same people, it’s the same mindset. It’s the same thing. Hydrogen will suddenly become very expensive. Everything will be harder to get. It will be the same thing. It will be people paying fortunes for futures in hydrogen technology and the whole thing. But the thing is that we keep going back to the hand, the claw, to the nail of the monster, which comes out and grabs us right on the edge of the road as we’re going by. And every once in a while you have to go in. And you go in and it goes (POP!) It’s got you again. You’ve got to eliminate it. And I think that it can be done. This is the twenty-first century, we have computer technology, we have the Internet, we are looking at things all around the world, all the time, innovations happening everywhere – you’ve just got to be looking for innovation, keep using the right keywords, keep googling, keep looking, and then when you find something, expose it, expose it so everybody sees it. Don’t let it die in a garage. Find something and let everybody see what it is. Make a movie about it. Make it so that people can see what it is. They can go, well how the hell can a nineteen and a half foot, two and a half ton Lincoln Continental get a hundred and eighty miles to the gallon? How can that happen? Why can’t my SUV do that? How does that happen? that’s the goal. There’s gonna be success – we’ll get it. Success is trying. Success is going towards the goal. However far we get is gonna be good. We’ll be that much closer to it. If we get all the way, it’ll be a world-changing event. But we’re not the only ones. Just the fact that we’re going will make other people go. Just the fact that we’re going and we want to go has got people coming out of the woodwork, coming to our shop, coming to our garage, coming to our place in Wichita, where we’re doing this, showing up with technologies that are so off the wall, you would not believe it.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Like what?

NEIL YOUNG: Things that – there’s ideas where there’s water for gas. There’s perpetual motion and electric generators, with the magnets reversed and things, so you start it up with power, and then you turn it off and it keeps on going. There’s all kinds of fringe things – there’s other ones. There’s compressed air, there’s compressed air that regenerates more compressed air, through the difference between the cold and the hot, creating the energy to create more compressed air, and the engines run on compressed air – so the car, as it’s going along, creates more fuel and keeps on going. There are people doing that in Australia right now. There are things like that happening around the world, and what I’ve done by focusing on innovation – and making myself conceivably the laughingstock of the world – is to give people a chance to come out with their ideas, and know that if they go somewhere, there’s a clearing house for innovation, that we have a place where we will – if your idea works, we’re gonna put it in our car, and if we don’t put it in this car, we’ll put it in another car. I mean, we’re gonna do this until people see it. And we’ll make movies about it, and we’ll do whatever we need to do.

                                       (Photo: Steve Cross)

RICHARD B. SIMON: What’s the story with the current movie?

NEIL YOUNG: We’re shooting it. Today the car was in test in Kansas. Today the car went – a two and a half ton, nineteen and a half foot Lincoln Continental went 85 miles on a battery. On a bank of batteries. Eighty-five miles. And we have got a generator in this thing that is so efficient, using a Mazda rotary engine – the Wankel Rotary – and the Tesla turbine with rocket technology in the wings inside, in the blades of the turbine, and vaporized fuel technology that is – this thing is – and the batteries we use take less time, take about the same amount of time as it takes to fill a tank of gas, to charge to eighty percent, which is as high as you want ‘em to go.

RICHARD B. SIMON: That’ll get you that range.

NEIL YOUNG: The range is there – you charge them up, we got it up, and today we went an equivalent of seventy-five miles. We went sixty miles with the wrong rear end. So, the wrong rear end, making our high speed 160 miles an hour instead of 105. So, our cruising speed was not the efficient speed. The efficient speed was 80, the inefficient speed that we went was 60. So, we were not running at an efficient thing, because we didn’t have the right rear end gearing. So, we’re changing our gearing, and doing that, and we’ll get it right. So, you know, today, in reality, we went 62 miles. We actually went 75 miles, because we know the difference in the math. We know what to do and we know what we’re building. So, we’re doing that, and then the generator system itself, in the amount of time it takes to fill a gas tank, we need to charge the batteries. But we need to give them a lot of power at that point, but we can. This is a 75 kilowatt generator. So we can bang the power right into it, charge it in that amount of time, and probably use less than a gallon of gas to do it. And when we use water technology on top of that, and we add the gas that we create from the water – it’s called HHO. From exciting the molecules in water, you can create a hydrogen-like gas, that you can mix, vaporize it and mix it with another fuel, like a biofuel, and you can put these fuels together, and so you displace half of the fuel that you were going to use, and so then, again, there’s another multiple of fifty percent on top of your efficiency. So, you keep going and going and going, hacking away at the efficiency, making it more and more efficient, and reducing the fuel load by replacing parts of the fuel with other things that aren’t strong enough on their own, but are strong enough to take a piece out of it – until, finally, you have a huge brick shithouse flying around the highway at about 65 miles an hour, getting a hundred and eighty five miles to the gallon. Or more.

RICHARD B. SIMON: And something you can show – it seems like the car companies have gone out of their way to make efficient cars and alt-fuel cars seem like they’re for dorky people, they’re not cool at all.

NEIL YOUNG: Yeah, right. Well, when you see this thing, it’s the coolest fuckin’ car you ever saw. And it’s fast. It’s very fast. It’s much faster than it used to be with its giant V-8 in it.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Really?

NEIL YOUNG: Oh, yeah.

RICHARD B. SIMON: And with hills and stuff?

NEIL YOUNG: No problem. Electric motors are the most efficient motors for moving an automobile. You have instant torque, at one mile an hour you got as much torque as you have at eighty. You got just torque for days. The big thing is stepping down the electric motor so you don’t blow off your tires and ruin your rear end. There’s a lot of power in electricity.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Why are you doing this?

NEIL YOUNG: Because I don’t like war.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Well, what’s the connection, then?

NEIL YOUNG: Energy, oil, war. That’s the connection.

RICHARD B. SIMON: So, the electric car is a direct response to everything else.

NEIL YOUNG: Innovation is a direct response to the world we’re living in. We’re living with a set of rules that just doesn’t work. We’re using the wrong fuel, and people, just regular guys like you and I, gotta start taking aim at it. If you have an idea you’ve got to take a shot. I have the luxury of being able to take a shot, so I’m taking it. People have given this to me, I’m giving it back.

RICHARD B. SIMON: I’ve read you say that you don’t believe that music can change the world anymore.

NEIL YOUNG: I don’t think one song can change the world. I think it makes a difference. But I don’t think that it changes the world. What needs to happen now is we need quick change. We need to change the world in record time. We need to make a big change. And if you don’t show the way, if people don’t see that the technology exists and go – and you combine the situation of what I’m talking about with these oil prices that are going on, and the senate saying, the Republicans saying, no we’re not gonna have a windfall oil tax on the oil companies, and we’re not going to fine them for doing this or that – because they’re ripping us off.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Several times.

NEIL YOUNG: Yeah, several times over. And the war is for them. Because they control the [Bush] administration. It’s all the same shit. If you remove roadside refueling, you change the world. It’s simple. And it’s not easy – but if nobody takes a shot at it, it’ll never happen. You know, people will be able to say now, again, they’ll have another reason to say that I’m crazy. And that’s okay. I don’t mind. I’d rather be crazy. I’d rather be crazy and working on something that I believe in than be acceptable to people who think that dreaming and going for big goals is crazy. (pause). Have you been to lincvolt.com?

RICHARD B. SIMON: I was just looking at it.

NEIL YOUNG: Oh, yeah.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Do you think it’s possible that, because the federal government hasn’t done shit about any of this, that we may look back in fifty years and say that Bush was the best thing to happen, because it forced oil prices up and it forced this kind of action to come from the ground up, where it can’t be – my Dad had an electric car dealership, right? ’79, ’80. They were getting the cars from a manufacturer, they were putting battery-powered motors in an AMC Concorde, right?

NEIL YOUNG: Yeah! Cool. Great idea.

RICHARD B. SIMON: They couldn’t build them fast enough, and it only got like 32 miles to the charge ...

NEIL YOUNG: Yeah ...

RICHARD B. SIMON: ... which was unacceptable to people in ‘79. Reagan came in, killed all the funding, and that was it.

NEIL YOUNG: That was one of the things Reagan did that was a real fuckin’ idiotic move. One of many economic moves that he made that were really stupid.

RICHARD B. SIMON: But he could do that. This movement, you’re not going to be able to do that, because it’s not relying on the government teat – and it’s happening all over the place from the ground up.

NEIL YOUNG: I tell you what, if the government, if anybody tries to stop this, the dot-com generation will come in and fucking kick their ass. You get Google, Salesforce.com and two or three other of these guys behind an idea like this, it’ll fuckin’ happen, regardless of what government’s in charge. These guys are – there’s a lot of power there, and there’s some really good, thinking people there, with some consciences about what’s going on on the planet, so I have a lot of confidence that if it has to happen, one way or another, it’s gonna happen. What I want to do is try to get people to – anybody with an idea – to work on it. Don’t think it can’t be done. Don’t believe anybody that tells you you can’t do it. Work on it. Try it. Do whatever you need to do. I want to create an organization that’s a clearinghouse for innovation. All we do is collect innovators – that’s all we do.

RICHARD B. SIMON: And fund them somehow.

NEIL YOUNG: Fund them or tell them no, explain to them why they’re on the wrong track, put a pool of things together, get all kinds of information together under one roof, join all the technologies – maybe two people are working in two separate parts of the world on two completely unrelated ideas, and they’re just totally in vacuums, but they end up on the Internet, somehow talking about it and putting something up and somebody sees that and puts those two things together and goes, well here they are! Look at that! That’s what – the Internet will let us do that. We can make connections that were never made before. We have all the tools, we have the intelligence, we’ve got the opportunity, and we have the necessity. So we’re gonna do it.
...

RICHARD B. SIMON: Are you writing music right now, as all this other stuff is going on, or are you single-mindedly ...

NEIL YOUNG: I have a few things going on in the background.

RICHARD B. SIMON: And is it related to – are you writing songs about an electric car ... ?

NEIL YOUNG: No, no.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Do you know when you wake up what hat you’re going to put on that day? Or how do you decide –

NEIL YOUNG: No, no.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Is there a decision or is it just, I’m gonna work on the car today, I’m gonna play acoustic guitar today, I’m gonna be a fuckin’ punk rocker today ... ?

NEIL YOUNG: It’s a feeling, it’s a feeling. Anything’s possible, you just have to go with it. Musically, it’s a feeling. What I want to do, I’ll do it. As far as the car goes, I’m working on the car 24-7, and the people are working on it, whether – while I’m sitting here, they’re charging the car, getting it ready for a test tomorrow. You know, the car is going forward. This car rocks. This fuckin’ car rocks big time.

BOB MERLIS, Publicist: Tell us how you really feel. (YOUNG laughs) It’s cool. I went out there.

RICHARD B. SIMON: I was hoping it was going to be here, so I could check it out.

NEIL YOUNG: Oh no ... The car is so out there, it is so wack. You know, it looks like an electric car, it looks like something out of space, you know –

RICHARD B. SIMON: Does it have all sorts of – you know, the flux capacitor and stuff, hanging off of it?

NEIL YOUNG: No, it’s just what it was originally designed ...

RICHARD B. SIMON: Oh, you mean the original design looks like that – it’s true, huh?

BOB MERLIS: The ’59 Lincoln looks like a space car ...

NEIL YOUNG: Like a very futuristic fuckin’ space car.

RICHARD B. SIMON: That was the idea, right?

NEIL YOUNG: Yeah. And when the top goes down and the fuckin’ flap goes up, and all this shit happens, it’s a mechanical wonder. I mean, shit starts opening and closing and things are happening, and motors are whirring and everything, and you open it up and you look down there, and there’s all these fuckin’ little silver wires running around, all organized and going into this blue box that’s glowing in there, and you’re looking down there at all this shit, and then the thing – you know, and then the top goes down and the lid closes and you can’t see it anymore. The motor’s right on the rear end, it’s just sitting there on the rear end, it’s got a drive shaft that’s like six inches long.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Hm. You’re losing nothing.

NEIL YOUNG: Hundred and fifty kilowatt motor, six inches from the rear end. It’s a good deal.

RICHARD B. SIMON: You’re getting rid of all that loss to friction and heat and everything...

NEIL YOUNG: All that stuff, yeah ...

RICHARD B. SIMON: ... where we’re burning like – it’s only like ten percent or something of the [energy contained in the] oil you burn that actually makes it to the road.

NEIL YOUNG: Right, and all that shit hanging off an internal combustion engine to run the power steering, the hydraulic systems, all that crap, the heating, all that stuff --

RICHARD B. SIMON: Belts ...

NEIL YOUNG: Nothing, we have none of that. All those inefficiencies are gone. So, you know, your dad was really a pioneer. Your dad was probably one of the greatest pioneers in American history.

RICHARD B. SIMON: I’ll tell him you said so.

NEIL YOUNG: He was way ahead of the curve. He suffered the loss of the early pioneer. It’s the most noble thing you can do. You can tell him I said that – that’s what I think. I have total respect for him. I’m glad he did that. Very cool.

RICHARD B. SIMON: Thanks.

NEIL YOUNG: Yeah.

RICHARD B. SIMON: (to Bob Merlis, who is signalling the interview is over) We’ve got to move, huh?

BOB MERLIS: You gotta move.

NEIL YOUNG: (sings) You gotta moooove, you gotta move!

ENDE

(Richard B. Simon Interview with Neil Young)

Obama Comes Through On Auto Emissions

2009-01-26T22:21:00.000-08:00


       Obama: "The days of Washington dragging its heels
      are over ... (photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Looks like we picked the right guy.

President Barack Obama is already delivering on promises to change this country's approach to climate change -- which heretofore has been largely to ignore it.

We've lost a critical decade to those who'd rather see sea levels rise and coastal civilizations destroyed than stop making profits from selling fossil fuels to burn into the great garbage can in the sky.

They bought the government, rather than investing in the next energy economy.

Today, Obama signed an executive order telling his EPA Administrator to move toward allowing California and twelve other states to set limits on vehicular greenhouse gas emissions. California has customarily been allowed to lead in auto emissions policy, because its clean air rules pre-date the federal Clean Air Act.

Already, flacks for the auto manufacturers have hit the airwaves -- along with Republican members of Congress such as the oil state Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, who equates global warming with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster -- to decry the new rules as a mortal threat to the automakers, which are already reaching into our pockets for bailouts.

But the auto manufacturers have been making this same argument for decades: it's just too expensive to re-tool to make more efficient automobiles.

Well, the events of the last year have put the lie to that. When gas prices skyrocketed to nearly $5 per gallon, people stopped buying big, dumb American SUVs -- and started buying little Japanese coupes and hybrids, just as they did in the 1970s.

And the American automakers, which spent thirty years convincing their workers that increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards would cause layoffs, laid off workers by the tens of thousands because Americans were buying high fuel economy cars, rather than the Cadillac Escalation -- and Hummers were going up on blocks in driveways across America.

The fact is that, partly because of the Bush Administration's approach to regulating fuel economy, which gave SUVs the same exemptions that pickup trucks had, the American fleet not only grew as inefficient as it had been since the 1980s, the automakers began to rely on selling the big, dumb SUVs, which yielded a wider profit margin than ordinary passenger vehicles. Even though the SUVs were mostly being used as glorified station wagons.

And today, the car companies' shills are back out on the news shows, making the same exact argument they've made for decades -- that higher fuel economy means littler, less powerful cars.

They of so little imagination, they'd rather legislate than innovate -- and so instead of hiring engineers to invent the powerful electric/hybrid/fuel cell, they'll spend their money to hire lawyers to try to continue to block the new fuel economy standards, as they have successfully done since 2002.

The funny part is that, now that we've spent 30 billion dollars to bail out GM and Chrysler, the US auto industry insists that we allow them to continue to manufacture, indefinitely, a product that relies on oceans of oil that simply will not exist infinitely -- and that, so long as they do, will require military intervention to keep them flowing from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria to U.S. consumers -- who will then have to offer up not only our tax dollars, but the lives of our daughters and sons, to keep them flowing.

That's not exactly a fair deal for the rest of us.

From what I recall, he who pays the bills makes the rules.

For now, Ford, Chrysler, and GM's approach to the global warming crisis that their products, used correctly, have created, is -- if you'll pardon the expression -- "No, we can't."

But the climate catastrophe we thought would unfold in Grandchildren's time is upon us today.

We can no longer afford to put off action.

I just finished reading and analyzing Obama's inaugural address, to discuss with my students tomorrow.

Here's a key passage:

We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality ... and lower its costs.

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

Obama's already begun, in a big way, to live up to his rhetoric.

Now the rest of us must do our part.

A New Dawn Rises In America

2009-01-23T15:11:00.000-08:00

A Report from the Inauguration of President Barack Obama

by Richard B. Simon
January 23, 2008

We streamed toward the National Mall from all across the frozen city. At 8 am, the crowds were still thin by the Washington Monument, but closer to the Capitol, the buses had begun to arrive, and the stream thickened into thick, viscous flows of human lava.

Nearly two million people showed up at the Capitol Tuesday to see Barack Obama inaugurated as President of the United States. Around 250,000 had tickets. Many of them were not able to get in to their designated sections. We heard that a generator went out, and that magnetometers were therefore down - so some sections' gates were closed. At other gates, security (the Secret Service had the lead; Capitol Police were the boots on the ground) decided that the sections were simply too full - and so thousands with tickets were turned back. Thousands of ticketholders were stuck in a tunnel through the whole thing. There was virtually no crowd control. They should have hired an extra layer of rock industry professionals.

Every official ticketed entrance point was a choke point (though, at least at the Silver standing section, no one was actually checking tickets - the police were only looking for weapons.) Crowds thickened and thickened into them, with the occasional fear of a mad crush. Word was that an early push in which crowds in the front of the Mall bore down through the fencing separating off the wheelchair section left two people injured. Another woman, earlier in the morning, had been pushed by the surging throng into the tracks on the underground Metro. There was plenty of disappointment, but there was no violence, and no riot. Instead, when people tried to jump the lines, others said, loudly, "Barack wouldn't do it like that." Tempered, already, by those better angels.

When we finally got through the line, we were relieved, to say the least. We wound up just behind the reflecting pool, close enough to see the Capitol, the big picture, unobstructed, but we had to consult the big screen off to the side for the details. One woman (she works for Health and Human Services processing grants to Universities) and I traded notes as we watched the screens and commented on which dignitaries were approaching through the hallways, or being shown to their seats. Kennedy in a white hat, Jimmy and Roslyn Carter, Dan Quayle, the Clintons, the elder Bushes, and Cheney, all in black, in a wheelchair, with a villain's black cowboy hat - the evil F.D.R. from a parallel universe. When the M.C. introduced him, two million Americans booed.

As soon as Biden was sworn in, we felt the first rush of relief. "One down, one to go," said someone.

The moment was electric, atomic - a sense of complete awe and disbelief and palpable history, camaraderie and love for fellow humans, mixed with a twinge of fear that a million of those fellow humans might be just about to surge forward and push us down the concrete stairs and onto the iced-over reflecting pool, where we'd fall through, or be crushed, or both.

And then Obama was announced.

And then Obama took the oath.

African American women on the Mall in floor-length fur coats and fur hats, crying. I can only imagine what some of them had seen, what insults they may have suffered as little girls and as women, to make this moment so poignant. I cried with them. This is a whole different country than that in which they thought they had been living. We hugged, high-fived, shook hands, took each other's pictures. A whole new generation of flag-waving American Patriots was born on Tuesday. And a whole old generation of people who had not tasted the strange and bitter fruits, but who loved their country and believed in its principles, who despaired its hostile takeover and sharp veer toward fascist dictatorship, got their country back. Did you see them, the two million of them, waving those flags in unison, riding the rippling sound wave all the way to the white obelisk? As awe-inspiring as that terrifying opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics -- but free.

Obama spoke, and even as he thanked Bush, and subtly chided the two million who had booed, he slid the knife in beneath the scoundrel's rib. He essentially repudiated Bush's America, and declared that the bullying, go-it-alone America was done. America would continue to fight terrorists and enemies all, but it would do so without compromising its core values. America was back. He told us it was going to be difficult, and that we'd make it through, better and stronger. He challenged us. And he threw the gauntlet down to hostile foreign powers, in parallel to what the founding fathers had done in the Declaration of Independence: Open hand or closed fist. Your choice. He affirmed that we are a nation of Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Jews and non-believers and that our very strength emanates from our diversity. He reached out to his relatives' village in Africa, and said, for the first time the Leader of the Free World has ever said such a thing to anyone on any continent that was not Europe, we.

He called on Americans to roll up our sleeves and get to work on a New Green Deal - and, in rebuttal, he underscored that those who don't think we can do this simply do not get what has just happened in this country:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift. And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We'll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

The degree to which I heard what I have longed to hear from an American leader was stunning.

In pretty much his every action and every belief, George W. Bush has been the exact opposite of what a leader should be. George W. Bush's version of America has been the exact antithesis of what my vision of America has always been. Bush's reign was one of secrecy and unaccountability in government, of cronyism and corruption, of corporatism and elitism, of division and holier-than-thou self-righteousness, of belligerence and bullying, of ignorance and contempt for knowledge and wisdom, of utter disregard for the planet on which our survival depends, for the rule of law, and for the central founding principles of this country: that in a democracy, the will of the people rules; the president works for the people; and the right of the people to know what the government is doing is essential to the health of the democracy. Bush's America was one of selfishness and arrogance and greed: I'll get what's mine, and if you don't like it, that's your problem. Bush's was a reign of propaganda, of trickery and deceit, a triumph of stagecraft over content. A looting and a pillaging of our pockets, of the national treasury, of the nation's future -- and of Iraq. And while the slogans trumpeted the spread of freedom and democracy abroad, the actions sought purposefully to choke freedom and democracy at home. It doesn't matter what the American people think, Cheney reaffirmed last week to an astonished Jim Lehrer. Real leaders, he said, ignore public opinion.

In his speech, Obama told us very clearly that he will lead, rather than rule. Imperial America yields once more to America, Democracy. The two can not coexist.

And so, this is an utterly astounding moment. Someone who seems to think as I think, and believe largely what I believe, who sees this country as I see it, is its President. It is unfathomable.

It is difficult to get used to hearing the phrase "The President" and not cringe in reflex. It is downright bizarre to hear the words "the White House" and have to remind oneself to no longer picture a hostile entity.

It is difficult to fathom not just tolerating, but actually liking the President. Obama has said that people project their hopes onto him. But perhaps that is because Obama is so many things. Then-nominee Joe Biden said it best, in what may or may not have been a flub, when he called the then-candidate "Barack America." Asian and African, Kansan and Hawaiian and New Yorker and Chicagoan, native-born and immigrant, islander and mainlander, wealthy author and welfare child of a single mom, street organizer and Senator, Constitutional Law Professor and a shooter of hoops. Roosevelt and Reagan, Lincoln and Kennedy and King. At this juncture, Barack Obama is America. He is the first President who is not an Anglo-Caucasian male - and so, for all of us who don't fit that description, this is a new country. It's one in which we really can, any of us, any of our children, grow up to be President.

Obama is also exceptionally charismatic -- which is, when it comes down to it, what Americans want in a president. It's why Clinton won, and Reagan; why Bush I beat Dukakis; why Bush v. Gore was a dead-even tie and why Kerry never had a chance, and it's why Obama was a shoo-in, from the moment he stood up to speak at Kerry's 2004 convention. He looks good on television -- and he looks cool on a t-shirt.

And so, everywhere, like mushrooms, sprang impromptu Malls selling Obama merchandise. On the sidewalks between the Capitol and Union Station. In Union Station. In every store with a cash box, including liquor stores and Ethiopian restaurants. All down Pennsylvania avenue in the Parade zone (where the Obamas stepped out of the black armored limo and signalled, visually, that the Presidency belongs to the American people again). Obama HOPE. Obama HISTORY. Inauguration of Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States of America I WAS THERE! One T-shirt featuring the famous photo of King and Malcolm X -- with Obama's head replacing X's. Another of the legendary Ali-Liston knockout, with Obama's head on Ali, and McCain's on Liston. Spangled shirts with Obama's head and name. And infinite ripoffs of Shepard Fairey's iconic HOPE poster. Obama's visage is, indeed, the new Che and the new Bob Marley, rolled into one. In the food court beneath Union Station, a tchotchke wagon in yet another impromptu Obama mall featured one Che belt buckle, and one Bob Marley. This, beside a whole wagon selling nothing but handmade Obama logo pins, and a storefront selling Obama T-shirts and posters and pins and jackets and calendars, caps and masks, its PA system broadcasting a CD of Obama's speeches set to sampled funk grooves.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a cult of personality.

This one has not been manufactured whole by propagandists as a means of social control. Still, we must be very careful. We must protect reason against emotion. We must be ever on guard for that shifting line between legitimate persuasion, which asks us to think, and propaganda, which tricks us into feeling, so that we do not think about whether our leaders are trying to sell us policies that are good for us, or that are merely good for them.

Bushism has been banished by the sands of time, repudiated by the will of the people. The pox is lifted. A half hour after the end of the ceremony, the helicopter rose from the East side of the Capitol, and swept the dome, and over the Mall - Bush getting his last glimpse of Washington before, like Nixon, leaving in disgrace. Earlier in the day when the now-former president was introduced, 1.8 million people on the Mall booed him with gusto. They sang the 1969 Steam novelty hit, "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye." In the back, by the Washington Monument, they sang Ray Charles' "Hit The Road, Jack."

The accountability moment, at last.

It appears now that, like Ali with George Foreman, the Democrats have been playing rope-a-dope with the outgoing Bushists, pretending that they were willing to let the malfeasance of Bush Cheney ooze, victorious, into the West - perhaps so that they would let their guard down. Suddenly, three years worth of missing White House emails reappeared. The transition of power took place. And, Wednesday night, Nancy Pelosi (our host) was on Larry King, talking about John Conyers' call to investigate Bush Administration policies:

I do think that there should be some review of some of the actions that may be criminal that occurred in the Bush administration. I don't know specifically the parameters of the investigation Mr. Conyers is talking about. I'm sure he will make that known to me.

Pelosi and company made the political decision to first take over the government, then pursue the crimes of the Bush Administration - rather than pursuing impeachment with Bush still in power, and risk losing both the legal battle against the fortified Unitary Executive, and the election. Bush was not driven ignominiously from office. But Pelosi always argued that that would have been impossible - the Republicans had enough seats in Congress to prevent it. We need to make sure that these investigations continue. Only a thorough airing of what happened can begin to prevent it from happening again, the Democrats from making the very same mistakes.

President Obama began immediately to roll back Bush's policies, signing a series of executive orders on Day One, beginning with stopping all pending Bush regulations (as Bush did to Clinton); inverting Freedom of Information Act policy so that releasing information to the scrutiny of the public is the rule, and secrecy is the exception (the opposite had been the case since Cheney's "task force" of energy industry robber-barons secretly plotted a do-nothing climate policy and the Invasion of Iraq); and taking steps to close (though not completely) the revolving door between White House service and lobbying the White House on behalf of private interests. He even froze pay for top-level White House staff.

Obama's new EPA Administrator is already looking to approve California's request for a waiver to allow it to lead the pack in setting Greenhouse Gas emissions restrictions. The waiver is customarily granted to California, whose clean air rules predated the national Clean Air Act - but Bush-Exxon-GM-Etcetera had opposed the state's efforts to limit carbon emissions.

On Day Two, Obama signed executive orders closing Guantanamo Bay Prison within a year, and banning torture. Senator John McCain approves. They were natural allies, from the start. On Day Three, Obama is pushing the beginning of the Green Deal through Congress and bombing al Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is believed to be in hiding. We are back to where we were before the Special Forces were pulled out of Afghanistan, and bin Laden was allowed to slip away and become the boogey-man driving the public's bloodlust for oil-rich Iraq. The Washington Post's analysis is that the Bush's permanent, boundless, limitless, lawless "War on Terror" is over.

The real new American century is about to begin.

The Capital On The Edge Of The Obama Age

2009-01-19T20:24:00.000-08:00

by Richard B. Simon

WASHINGTON, D.C. --

Washington, D.C. is nuts right now. We're staying with friends in the U Street area, a historically African-American neighborhood, about a mile from the Capitol. The barbecue joint where Obama ate a sausage last week is right around the corner -- and the line to get in is around the block.

Obama is everywhere -- t-shirts, hats, buttons, posters, flags, scarves, jackets, shopping bags with the whole Obama family on them -- and on every TV, seemingly at all times. It's what North Korea must be like.

Around the Capitol are lines, too -- today, lines to get tickets to the Inauguration, itself. Every Congressional office building was ringed with people waiting to get in to collect tickets from their Representative or Senator, all day long. Like the whole Inauguration, all 250,000 tickets, were at will call.

It's no way to run a rock concert.

But it worked.

There's a sense in this city that everyone, everywhere, is doing something related to the inauguration. Even people in a department store seemed like they were only there stocking up on inauguration supplies. No one appears to be just going about their daily business.

This is an enormous moment -- and it's really just starting to sink in. There was a report on the News Hour last week on the slaves who built the Capitol. The Capitol was built by slave labor -- but the artist who created the statue atop the Capitol dome fitted it out with a cap that was, unmistakeably, the cap worn by a freed slave ... in ancient Rome. A Southern congressman objected -- and the cap was replaced with a centurion's helmet.

High above the new President as he is sworn in will be a freed slave, triumphant.

Obama is not descended from the slaves who built this country, but his wife and daughters are. And this moment is inextricably linked to the legacy of slavery, to the civil rights struggle, to the African American experience. We've waited all our lives for the first black president. We knew this would be a historic moment, but we didn't know quite what that would mean.

It is bigger that we can sense quite yet. It changes something fundamental at the very heart of this country. It changes everything. It is a moment of awe.

The tschotchkes may be vulgar, but this is the only way we really know how to deal with something this big. The only possible comparisons are major rock festivals and sporting events. The Olympics, perhaps. It's like football in Pittsburgh, where everything, everywhere, says "Steelers" on it. Or the Raider Nation. Or Grateful Dead tour, where everybody is wearing the colors, every car has a sticker, and everyone new you meet is singing a song you already know by heart. So we buy the t-shirt and the poster and the baseball cap with the Presidential seal and Barack Obama's signature and the number 44. So everybody knows we were there.

Noticeably absent is any fondness for the guy whose last day is today. You'd imagine that, in different times, a governmental changeover might be full of excitement for a new president mixed with nostalgia for the guy on his way out. But George Bush hardly exists here in Obamaland.

There's word on the news that Cheney threw out his back. There's an inflated effigy of Bush at DuPont Circle, at which people are throwing their shoes. Sounds like Bush gave some kind of speech today, too.

At Reagan National Airport, the gift shops were fully stocked with Obama merchandise, anything you'd want. But nothing Bush to be seen. I did see a rack of orange jumpsuits hanging in one store window in the airport -- an odd place, I thought, to sell Guantanamo Bay prison jumpsuits, like the ones we saw in Europe. But it turned out they were just old-fashioned NASA Apollo spacesuits. Beside them were little monkeys, in little orange flightsuits.

They were Ham, the first chimp in space.

For 2009, A Two Dollar Gas Tax

2008-12-31T16:30:00.000-08:00

Richard B. Simon

Last weekend, both the New York Times Editorial Board, likely under the influence of Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman -- and then Friedman himself -- called for a new federal tax on a gallon of gasoline.

They're right -- and $2 per gallon is the right number.

On September 11, 2001, the price of a gallon of gasoline, averaged for all grades and all formulations (according to the U.S. Department of Energy), was $1.56. Gasoline prices rose steadily from there, until they peaked at over $4.16 per gallon, in July, 2008.

On December 29, 2008, the national average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was 1.67. The price collapsed because we were using less.

The market has given us a do-over. We must take this opportunity to raise the gasoline tax by $2 per gallon immediately -- to bring the per gallon price to $3.67.

Let's take a look at why.

Americans consume 378 million gallons of automotive gasoline, each day. That's about 1.26 gallons each day for every American man, woman, and child.

Each year, Americans consume 138,065,000,000 gallons of gasoline. That's a hundred and thirty-eight billion, 65 million gallons.

Now we're getting into the kinds of numbers that Americans recognize as we enter 2009 -- the kinds of numbers which, if they were dollars, you could use to pay for a war, or a bailout of a banking industry, or a massive infrastructure project, or a nationwide transition to a new energy economy. It's the kind of number we've been putting on our national credit card at fairly regular intervals in the Bush years.

Now imagine if, on September 12, 2001, George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress had instituted what Friedman calls a "Patriot Tax" of one dollar per gallon on every gallon of gasoline sold. It means that gas would have gone up from 1.56 to 2.56 per gallon, overnight.

In the first year of the "War on Terror," the United States treasury would have raised 138 billion dollars.

That would have paid for the War in Afghanistan to rout the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Why respond to 9/11 with a gasoline tax? It should be clear to most Americans by now that by spending all that money on gasoline, we were sending money to the Saudis. The only real industry in Saudi Arabia is the oil industry -- oil money funds the operations of the entire country.

So when fifteen out of nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, every glass of milk they drank as babies, every meal they ate, every stitch of clothing they wore, every plane trip they took, was purchased with Saudi oil wealth. And we are the largest consumer of their product. We raised them.

Not only that, Osama Bin Laden's personal fortune comes from family money his father raised building massive construction projects for the Saudi Government -- using the money that you used to put gasoline in your car.

Finally, the Saudis essentially export militantism to keep their own militants quiet at home. And now, as we return to Afghanistan to finish the job left undone so we could fight an Oil War in Iraq, we are battling a fundamentalism that was birthed in Saudi-funded Pakistani madrassas, schools that teach Pakistani children to hate the west, funded by the money you send the Saudi government every time you fill up your Lincoln Extravigator or your Ford Earthterminator.

Clear enough? Buy less gasoline, send less funding to al Qaeda.

Of course, we didn't add a $1 per gallon tax to each gallon of gasoline after September 11.

So, just when we should have been working to de-fund the Saudis (and perhaps Iran and Iraq), we began making them wealthier, by shifting US auto consumption to massive, low-mileage SUVs -- burning a gallon of gas in a trip to the supermarket, instead of a third of a gallon. We bought giant car-trucks to make ourselves feel safe in an age of danger. But they made us less safe.

It took almost four years for the price of gas to climb that extra dollar -- to $2.55 in August, 2005.

But did climb, gradually, across those years. And instead of every extra cent over $1.56 going to the U.S. Treasury, every cent over $1.56, on each gallon we bought, went to the oil companies, which used all that money to lobby the Bush Administration to invade Iraq -- and to wage a massive disinformation campaign designed to make you believe that global warming is not real, and not caused by their product. They used the profits not to move their companies into the next energy economy, but to manipulate the government to enshrine their dominance, and to buy their own stock. Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury sank further and further into debt. And so did American families.

On March 17, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, the average price of regular gasoline was $1.77.

U.S. News and World Report reported two weeks ago that, according to a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments study, the two wars together have cost the U.S. $904 billion, to date. But by 2018, that cost will have risen to $1.3 to 1.7 trillion. And the interest on the money -- which we borrowed from the Saudis and the Chinese, will raise the total cost of both wars to $2.5 trillion.

If we had added $2 to the price of a gallon of gas on September 12, 2001, we would have been paying $3.52 per gallon. In those seven years, had consumption remained the same, we would have added $966 billion to the U.S. Treasury. We could have funded the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in their entirety -- and saved $1,600,000,000,000 in debt service.

And, wholly appropriately, the funding would have come from the end consumers of the product that keeps us entangled in that region. That's a pretty conservative economic solution. It's called internalizing the externalized costs -- in this case, the externalized costs of a gallon of gasoline. If I take the electric bus, why should I subsidize my neighbor's GM Bummer through my income taxes? When you internalize the cost of gasoline, you make the actual end user pay, instead of making everyone else pay.

If we had raised the gasoline tax by $2 per gallon on September 12, 2008, we could have used some of the money to help the U.S. auto industry shift to building cars that don't require that we invade other countries and kill people just so we can get to work in the morning.

If we had done that, the U.S. automakers would not be collapsing today, and asking for handouts in the billions just to keep the lights on at the factories they're closing. They might even have beaten the Japanese to the hybrid, to the fuel cell, to the high range electric car, to the Self Charging Electric Vehicle.

They certainly wouldn't have pegged their entire business model on the gas-guzzling SUV -- because at $3.52 a gallon, we would have stopped buying them much sooner.

The price of oil would have dropped much sooner -- as it has since its peak July -- because of the drop in demand.

But that would not have affected us much -- we would have been on to the next thing.

It would, however, have bothered a few of our national strategic competitors.

Iran would not have a nuclear weapons program, because we would not have been funding it by buying oil from them.

Vladimir Putin would not be enshrined as the popular dictator of a fascist new Petro-Russia, because we would not have funded his rise to power by buying oil from the Russian oil industry which Putin nationalized in his drive to cement his own power as dictator.

And Hugo Chavez would not be buying poor Americans heating oil to score propaganda points, because we would not be subsidizing his operation by buying oil from Venezuela.

Instead it took five years, until April 21, 2008, for gasoline to steadily climb to $3.50 per gallon. We paid every penny of it. And every single penny of that price increase went to the oil companies and to hostile foreign governments -- all of which used it to increase their political power; to work against fighting climate change; and to find new ways to keep Americans addicted to their product, and prevent our society from moving forward into the next energy economy.

That has cost jobs, led to higher sea levels, eroding beaches, mass species extinctions, spreading disease vectors, and more powerful storm systems -- including both warm-weather storms like hurricanes and more energetic winter storms, which dumped record snow across the entire continent in recent weeks -- costing billions in property damage and lost business.

Had we raised the gasoline tax by $2 per gallon on September 12, 2001, the United States would have been eight years into the next energy economy, instead of perched precariously at the doorstep of the Bush Depression.

Let's not make the same mistake again.

The new President and the New Congress must have the political courage to raise the gas tax by $2 per gallon. That will guarantee, as Friedman writes in his excellent Hot, Flat, and Crowded, that big corporate investors will invest in the next energy economy, without fear that Congress or OPEC will pull the rug out from under them by bringing back cheap gasoline.

The oil companies earned record profits in the Bush years -- the largest corporate profits in the history of the world. Bully for them. Let them use those profits to move to the next thing. If they want to keep sucking oil out of the ground, perhaps they can use it to develop new plastics which we can use to build ever-more efficient solar panels and ever-quieter wind turbines. We must no longer burn their product into the great garbage dump in the sky, our atmosphere.

More importantly, we ordinary Americans must have the foresight and the courage to support this major increase in the gas tax. That will make it a lot easier for typically cowardly politicians to act.

Bush told us we could wage a "Global War on Terror" and not pay for it. He was wrong.

When gas was $3.50 per gallon (it peaked at over $5.00 per gallon of high-test in San Francisco), we paid it -- but every cent went to the bad guys instead of being invested in our own country. Meanwhile, our schools fell apart, our bridges fell down, our roads potholed, our cities drowned, and our soldiers struggled to maintain control over the world's third largest supply of oil without body armor or armored trucks.

The good news was that at $3.50 per gallon, we began to change our habits. We rode public transit. We carpooled. We simplified our lives. Traffic declined. And we kept money out of the pockets of the Saudis and the Iranians -- which is why OPEC is holding emergency meetings every few weeks at the end of 2008 to try to cut oil production, to bring the price of oil back up.

They don't want the price to be too high, though -- because they know that we'll then use less.

Which is exactly what we need.

We need to use less gas -- and to guarantee that for every gallon of gas we do use, we're also spending a good chunk of change to get us off that poison, and on to the next thing.

The price of gas will rise again, and soon.

Before you know it, we'll be back up to $4, $5, $6 dollars per gallon.

The question is whether the difference between today's price and the future price funds our own American project to build the next energy economy, or funds the powerful interests who'd have us remain enslaved to the oil monster: al Qaeda, the Taliban, Putin, Ahmedinejad, the Saudi Royal family, the genocidal Sudanese government (which is cleansing its African population from off its oil fields, and using its new oil wealth to commit further genocide in Darfur), the monk-slaughtering Burmese junta, corrupt American politicians like the indicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, and the good folks at Exxon, who bring you Global Disaster, for the rest of eternity.

If we're actually thinking, the choice is pretty simple. Spend two dollars per gallon today and get us off oil all together, or spend that two dollars a trillion times over to pay the interest on the loans we take to fight the resource wars of the future against the tyrants our petrodollars are creating. Spend two dollars a gallon today to move to a cleaner energy economy, or spend 74 trillion dollars to remediate the devastating consequences of catastrophic global warming.

Fellow Americans, we must make this investment in our future.

We would oppose this tax literally at our own peril.

President-elect Obama, Republicans and Democrats and Independents in Congress, have courage.

Raise the gas tax.

First History of the Bush Depression

2008-12-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

The New York Times provides a deep history of the financial meltdown, as seen from within the Bush Administration -- pinning it on the coupling of Bush's push for more Americans to own homes (remember the "Ownership Society?) through artificially low mortgages, with Bush's (and, at critical junctures, Congress') aversion to regulation of the financial markets.

Bush's goal may have been noble -- it's a good idea for more Americans to own stake in the country -- though it's hard to decouple the "Ownership Society" from its intended political outcome: more Americans owning financial stake, as real estate and stock, would mean more Republicans, and lead to Bush and Karl Rove's vaunted Permanent Republican Majority.

But at the same time as the Bush Administration was pushing lenders to offer easier mortgages (enabling predatory lending practices), the Bush Administration took the government's hands off the regulatory levers in financial markets that were trading in the new debt that those housing policies had created.

The resonant metaphor here is: they took 25 sheriffs off the job just as the market was becoming the wild west.

Who could have predicted that all this would lead to a financial meltdown? Well, a few people within the Bush Administration. We've seen this pattern before: like Richard Clarke, warning of imminent al Qaeda assault, like State Department officials warning of the chaos that would follow an invasion of Iraq, and like Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center, warning of Lake Pontchartrain topping its levees, they were ignored.

We've seen this scene before, too:

The president listened as Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, laid out the latest terrifying news: The credit markets, gripped by panic, had frozen overnight, and banks were refusing to lend money.

Then his Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., told him that to stave off disaster, he would have to sign off on the biggest government bailout in history.

Mr. Bush, according to several people in the room, paused for a single, stunned moment to take it all in.

“How,” he wondered aloud, “did we get here?”

We've all long wondered whether this plague of Bush disasters was the result of malfeasance or negligence, a determined effort to destroy the country, or sheer and utter incompetence.

In the final stretch, it's still looking like a potent combination of the two -- Bush the Incompetent, and Cheney the Malfeasant, simultaneously running the country into the ground and dismantling all the safeguards.

This excellent piece of journalism reads like a history book, even-handed even in its indictment -- the first draft of the history of the Bush Depression.

Meet Your Dealer

2008-12-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

The Saudi oil minister wants to keep you addicted to his product.

So he's seeking the golden number -- the price at which oil is cheap enough that Americans don't shift to electric and alt-fuel vehicles, and expensive enough that the Saudi Royal Family can continue to run the Kingdom on the profits.

The Saudis learned in the 1970s that using "the oil weapon" was bad for business. OPEC nations embargoed sales of oil to the U.S. for its support of Israel; Americans waited in long cars on long lines to buy too-expensive gasoline; and suddenly Americans started buying little Japanese cars that got good gas mileage. The Big Boat American car died. OPEC nations' sales plummeted.

Until the 1980s, that is, when OPEC kept prices low, leading President Ronald Reagan to kill federal funding and support for alternative fuels and alternative-fuel vehicles, like the electric car.

When gas prices are low Americans buy bigger and bigger cars. And when gas prices are high, Americans buy smaller cars. It's happening again now -- high gas prices lead directly to Hummers up on blocks in driveways across America. But now oil prices are coming mysteriously down. A Gulf executive predicted $1 per gallon gas early next year. The Saudis want to bump the price up, to $55 per gallon. Iran and Venezuela want to keep the price higher. Likely the Saudis want to keep the price lower both to keep Americans in the oil market and to maintain its strategic dominance within OPEC over Iran, especially -- which the Saudis consider a major strategic opponent. If the Iranians are kept cash-poor, they're not a threat to the Saudis.

If oil prices are so high that we move to something else, none of them are a threat to America (though they'll have to rebuild their economies on more sustainable product).

In this excellent piece from 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl pokes around the kingdom, and the Saudis' efforts to ensure that King Oil remains King -- particularly by megaindustrializing once untenable oilfields, like Shayba, which lies under mountains of shifting sand.

The Saudis are a bit tone deaf here. They are gloating about how much oil they are going to be able to produce from these new fields -- and their operation is impressive. Stahl compares it to the construction of the pyramids.

But it is a gleaming steel disaster.

They're thinking we're so blind in our addiction that we forget that all that oil -- 200 billion barrels in Shayba -- will be burned into the atmosphere, a disaster for life on earth; and that the Saudi Royals, to preserve the stability of their rule, used those fat profits to export militant Wahhabism -- to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan.

Are we so addicted to their product that we forget that Saudi oil profits funded the 9/11 plotters? Bin Laden? And the Pakistani ISI, which in turn trained the Taliban -- and the Mumbai attackers? That we ignore, once more, that burning fossil fuels is altering the climate system to make life less habitable for our species?

They're counting on it.

Sympathy For The Devil

2008-12-05T12:04:00.000-08:00

                      Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

So, let's get this straight.

General Motors (with Standard Oil, now Exxon-Mobil; Firestone; and others) bought and dismantled city public transit systems in the 1930s and 40s.

They have consistently worked to stifle innovation and squash new competitors. When innovation rears its head outside their walls, the big automakers steal it -- or buy it and kill it.

They have fought in Congress for decades against raising federal fuel economy standards -- arguing that it would cost jobs -- much as they fought against seatbelts and airbags and catalytic converters, and just about every consumer, health, safety, or environmental safeguard that would affect their product.

After California passed the extremely rigorous Zero Emissions law in 1990, GM released the EV1 -- an electric car. I drove one. It was extremely cool, and fast, and silent. Like piloting a spaceship, a shuttlecraft from Star Trek.

But GM refused to sell the EV1 -- they leased the car to a test audience. Meanwhile, the automakers partnered with the oil companies, once again. The twin industries sued the State of California to kill the State's groundbreaking law, which mandated zero emissions vehicles in the fleet. And they succeeded in forcing the state to weaken the law. And once they succeeded, they cancelled the leases on all the EV1s, and, literally, crushed them. They sold the patent for the lead acid battery technology to Exxon. And it was never seen or heard from again.

The battery, of course -- the ability to store energy -- is what gives an electric car its range. Today GM is working to release the Volt, an electric hybrid that runs electricity but, for some strange reason, has a backup internal combustion engine that runs on gasoline. The Volt has a range of 40 miles. The EV1 had a range of 60-90 miles.

Instead of working to build fuel-efficient cars, they spent their money on lawyers and politicians. The intent was to kill new regulations intended to stave off catastrophic climate change. And it worked.

The automakers and the oil companies have banded together, for decades, to prevent forward motion on developing clean fuel automotive technology. They seem to have decided, together, that their mutual fate depends on vast supplies of cheap oil. For the automakers, big, powerful, gas-burning cars mean wide profit margins -- they make more money on an SUV than on a sedan. The internal combustion engine is also prone to wear and tear -- those are little explosions that move the car forward, after all. It has many moving parts, which break. Those parts must be replaced. So, too, must the vehicles, themselves, which at this point have roughly a 10-15 year lifetime.

Likely, a thorough investigation would illuminate a historical web of cross-ownership among the executives and directors of Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler -- an industrial marriage that entwines the two industries' fortunes together.

In 2000, the oil industry gave $26,739,976 to Republican candidates, and $7,038,306 to Democrats -- a 78%-21% margin. For 2008, their numbers were nearly identical. In 2000, the automakers gave $1,812,641 to Republicans and $808,378 to Democrats. (In 2000, the automakers gave nearly equally to Republicans and Democrats -- likely hoping Republicans would win, but also sensing the direction of the political wind. The numbers might explain the parties' current positions on the Big Three's proposed bailout).

Here, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, are the auto industry's top three recipients of political donations (from PACs and individuals giving over $200), in 2000:

1 Abraham, Spencer (R-MI) Senate $191,300
2 Bush, George W (R) $127,301
3 Dingell, John D (D-MI) House $73,100

Here are the oil and gas industry's top three for the same cycle:

1 Bush, George W (R) $1,958,851
2 Lazio, Rick A (R-NY) House $285,725
3 Abraham, Spencer (R-MI) Senate $258,221

You might recall what happened. George W. Bush, became the President. Spencer Abraham -- the "Congressman from Detroit" -- became Bush's energy secretary. Dingell, until last week, remained the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee in Congress.

Scarcely two years later, Bush led the nation to invade the nation with (at the time) the world's second largest reserves of the one substance that is essential to both the auto and oil industries.

Bush sent representatives from the oil industry to every global climate meeting, to successfully kill global action to stave off catastrophic climate change.

Again, the oil and auto industries banded together to kill public transit in cities; prevent technological innovation; distort energy and climate policy; and drive the nation to an unjust war.

We went to war against Iraq in 1991 to keep Saddam Hussein away from Saudi oil. We left our troops stationed in Saudi Arabia for another decade -- until the Saudi militant Osama Bin Laden sent airplanes into New York and Washington, and the Saudi Royal Family requested that U.S. Troops leave the kingdom.

So it's not that far a stretch to argue that the automakers and oil companies caused the September 11 attacks. Certainly the policies that they pushed through politicians whose favors they curried led to our military interventions on behalf of their products. And the September 11 attacks occurred partly in response to that military intervention.

The automakers spent their money on legislation, rather than innovation.

Allied with the oil companies, they never built low-emissions vehicles. So when gas prices skyrocketed -- partly as a result of the current Iraq war -- Americans stopped buying big, dumb American cars, and started buying hybrids that were being built only by Japanese companies, whose nation has few natural energy resources, and no military, and so must innovate to solve problems of energy supply and demand. They can't go to war for oil, so they build better cars.

The automakers are arguing today that the cause of their woes is the global financial meltdown. But, again, whose politicians pushed the deregulatory climate that led to the meltdown?

As Bill Clinton once said, it's the economy, stupid. But in this case, it's the fuel economy.

The "Big Three" built their industry on a business model that corrupted national politics, prevented critical action on the most urgent problem ever to face the species, and endangered national security in several dimensions.

That destructive business model has failed.

And now they are asking us for $34,000,000,000 to save it.

If we don't give GM, Ford, and Chrysler $34,000,000,000 today, they tell us, it will cost jobs. It will ripple across the economy. It will cause the Next Great Depression.

The Big Three CEOs went to Washington again, and this time, they brought the Union guy, to try to deflate the public antipathy (as if the Union hadn't also fought against higher fuel economy standards -- it's called my paycheck is more important than your planet). They pledged, out of the goodness of their hearts, to work for only $1 a year, each. Which is a pretty good sign that they have so much stock, that a multimillion dollar salary is disposable income, and that whatever income they don't take -- in 2009 -- they'll get later, as "deferred compensation." They're in the profit business after all.

These men, and their forebears, are the direct agents of the crises we face.

Perhaps the taxpayer should rescue the auto industry -- but we should not rescue the villains whose "public outreach" has brought the economy, governance, and the global environment to collapse.

We have a choice.

We can allow the U.S. automakers to fall, hoist upon their own petards. That would be justice.

I don't quite buy their line that America as we know it would spontaneously combust if they were to disappear. It's the same argument we've seen from them for forty years, and it has proven diametrically inaccurate.

Likely, the U.S. automakers' assets would be bought by foreign companies, who would run them better. The only issue, then, is of national security. It's a good idea to have a domestic vehicular manufacturing infrastructure, in case you someday need to build a lot of tanks and jeeps.

The other option is that we can make the rescue of these corrupt corporations, whose priorities run counter to the health, welfare, or national security of the American people, a complete overhaul.

Get rid of the CEOs and the boards whose business plan is a root cause of so many of our travails, from melting icecaps to the Iraq War, to George Bush and his hamhanded stewardship of the economy. Legislate the end of cross-ownership between the auto and oil industries. Harness these industrial behemoths and ride them into a new age, in which Americans don't have to kill people on other continents in order to get to and from work. Make them the leading edge of clean, mean, green technological re-industrialization.

Neil Young has a great solution: use existing factories to build "transition rollers", vehicles complete but for the engines, and sell those rollers to innovators who are building alternative-fuel engines (Young is a champion of self-charging electric vehicles. He's building one now. More on that later.) Of course, that's what electric car innovators were doing in the late 70s and early 80s -- before GM crushed them.

It's clear that the Big Three CEOs don't like either option. Mulally, of Ford, in a News Hour interview, came across as a glib schoolboy, full of false chastenment. "We really learned our lesson! Yes, maam!" He stressed that under a new plan, Ford will build new cars of all types -- small, medium, and large, and include fuel economy in their plans -- but clearly not as a top priority.

ALAN MULALLY: ... So our goal, our strategy, which is -- which is very different, again, very unique, is with Ford, you're going to know exactly what the brand promise is. You're going to be able to get vehicles of small, medium and large size, cars, utilities, and trucks, and know that they're going to be absolutely the best in quality, fuel efficiency, safety, and be the very best value.
...

GWEN IFILL: Were you surprised at the skepticism with which your appeal was greeted two weeks ago when you went to Capitol Hill?

ALAN MULALLY: [grinning] I learned a lot from our conversation in the first set of hearings. And I have a lot of compassion for what the leaders in Congress are dealing with right now.

That doesn't sound like a guy who's ready to put the national interest first. This is Ford, whose response to declining sales a few years back was to release a few handfuls of new models -- which were mostly new body shapes. What happened to Bill Ford, the innovator's great-grandson, who was supposedly prepared a decade ago to lead the company to its green future?

Bob Lutz, the exec at GM who's responsible for the Volt, doesn't even seem to believe it's all that great a car -- it's a throwaway. Just like the EV1, something to make it look like the company is doing something about global warming, which he says is a "total crock of shit."

It's as if they've just been waiting for oil prices to come back down and stay down, a goal of those who planned the Iraq War. But oil is still a finite resource -- there's only so much. And we're running out. Perhaps they're waiting for the ice caps to melt, so we can get at all that oil underneath the ice. Sure billions of people will be displaced, and more will die in resource wars over scarce food and fresh water. But the central defining principle of this great nation -- big, heavy cars that burn a lot of gas -- will be preserved.

The founding fathers will rest easy, in their underwater graves.

Change Is In The Air

2008-11-19T00:26:00.000-08:00

President-elect Barack Obama addressed a Los Angeles climate conference today and affirmed that his administration's commitment to action to stave off global warming has not been dampened by the economic downturn.

"Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all," Obama says. "Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response."

A new bipartisan coalition has coalesced to address climate change, building in statehouses across the country -- particularly in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West, and anchored in California (with kudos to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who finally extricated himself from Bushism and began to take after his action-hero characters) -- as an end-run around the White House.

Obama addresses that movement directly:

"When I am president, any governor who's willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that's willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that's willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America."

You may recall that Bush offered a "plan" in April -- to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. That, of course, was a cute way of saying we will continue to increase the megatons-volume of greenhouse gases the U.S. emits for another 17 years before we do anything at all.

Obama is committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and to reduce them by an additional 80 percent by 2050.

This is the first great sign that the days of sending guys who work for Exxon to international climate conferences as the U.S. representative, hellbent on torpedoing international agreement and scuttling action (remember when Exxon told EPA officials not to undermine Bush's legacy by regulating greenhouse gases?) is finally coming to a close.

Not yet, though. Globe Warmin' Bush is moving to "burrow" pro-industry, anti-environment political appointees into permanent Civil Service positions at the Interior Department -- where they're pushing to allow oil drilling virtually within our national parks, and Bush's EPA is moving swiftly to enact new regulations that will weaken the Clean Air Act to allow coal-burning power plants within sight of -- and upwind from -- national parks.

The good news is that, because of Bush's impervious fealty to Exxon's climate policy, support for action has built from the bottom up -- a solid foundation -- and will be ready to work with the new Administration to get the ball rolling on January 20 -- the day the nearly eight-year occupation of the White House by the energy industries ends.

Obama gets it. The way to rescue the economy is to make it America's business to rescue the planet.

(See also, Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Flat, and Crowded.)

Obama's pledge of $150 billion over ten years to invest in efficient technologies -- and kickstart new energy efficiency-based industries -- doesn't sound like much, since we're spending $200 billion each year in Iraq to maintain the petro-status-quo (imagine if we'd spent all that bread on alternative fuel technologies instead, to ensure we'd never have to fight a war for oil again). It may not be enough.

But it looks increasingly like the United States of America, city on the hill, beacon of hope, leader of the free world, is about to emerge from its forced early retirement.

Undo Bush Policies, Create Jobs

2008-11-10T15:08:00.000-08:00

Since August, President-elect Barack Obama's transition team has been quietly assessing Bush policies that can be quickly reversed.

Among them, granting an EPA waiver that will allow the State of California to regulate Carbon Dioxide emissions from automobiles (itself an end-run around Bush-Exxon obstructionism, supported by EPA staff, quashed by Bushist political appointees); lifting the ban on stem cell research; and removing the gag order that prohibits international family planning organizations from mentioning the word "abortion" if they want to receive U.S. government funding.

The incoming Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress are also moving to provide funding for U.S. automakers to help them retool to build more efficient automobiles.

And the always outstanding Dan Froomkin has more here.

As the U.S. economy sheds jobs, it will be interesting to watch as the new policies begin to create jobs. Retooling U.S. manufacturing will create jobs in rebuilding factories; R&D; engineering; alternative fuel technologies; and the web of industries that will provide support for automakers -- as well as institutions that are working to develop alternative fuel and fuel-efficient technologies.

Lifting the ban on funding stem cell research will provide instant job creation at America's universities and research institutions, and will spur growth in biotech and medicine.

These are jobs for scientists, engineers, graduate students, and factory hands -- not to mention the lunch counter operators who feed them.

One of the sickest aspects of the Bush years has been not merely the shifting of jobs overseas -- a natural product of globalization -- but that Bush's disastrous policies, typically stifling scientific and technological innovation at the behest of religious conservatives and the entrenched energy industries, have prevented the next cycle of new job-creating technologies from taking root.

The lid is coming off the pot.

Stay tuned.

Early Notes From The New America

2008-11-05T22:06:00.000-08:00

To borrow a phrase from Michelle Obama, I've never, in my entire life, been so proud of my country.

This morning, I woke up, made a cup of coffee, walked up to the cafe and picked up a copy of the New York Times and two copies of the San Francisco Chronicle.

I scanned the news for a while, had an editorial meeting, then set out for a walk across San Francisco in the New America.

When the bus pulled up, I couldn't stop grinning. I stepped aboard, and the driver waved me on, for free. Maybe the machine that takes the money wasn't working. But I don't think that's why.

A few blocks later, an older woman got on the bus with Obama buttons all over her coat and hat.

And that's what I saw all day, from the Lower Haight to the Embarcadero and back -- many, many black Americans wearing Obama T-shirts and buttons. Many, many people of every stripe, spot, fleck, and lack thereof, looking happy and walking with steam in their steps, and straight in their spines. Including me.

"Feels good, doesn't it?" I said to one young man, next to whom I found myself walking down Market Street. Obama's picture and name plastered across his chest.

"It's a start," he said. He was trying to be demure -- but his grin was busting through. Mine, too. A shiteating grin, all the way across the city.

"I'm just out for a walk in the city, taking a look around this new world," I said.

"Me, too," said he.

Halfway across San Francisco, and all the newspaper machines were empty, except for a few copies of the day before's LA Times. There was not a paper to be had in the city. Even Stacey's bookstore had a sign in the front door: SORRY -- WE'RE SOLD OUT OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND SF CHRONICLE.

The Chronicle put out a late edition at noon or one. The last time I remember them doing that was September 11, 2001. Because people knew history was unfolding before us, around us -- and we were saving those papers to show our children and grandchildren, to donate to the museums of our future.

Over the course of the day, as I walked and walked, I started sensing a feeling rising in me, something familiar but oddly just out of reach. It took a while to figure out what it was. I think it was the way I used to feel, back at the end of October of 2000, when I was still a daily music journalist, and a graduate student writing a lot of poetry -- before a hostile element hijacked our country and turned our national life into a miasma of fear and loathing, apprehension and distrust, propaganda, lies, disappointment, failure, and dread.

Barack Obama is not the messiah. He won't solve all our problems. He'll screw up and disappoint us, without a doubt. He's human. That's what we do.

But the big lesson of the past eight years is that it really is important who's at the top. We sometimes scoff that this idea of "character" can be more important than issues. But that's because "character" has been used so cynically -- as product branding (Maverick!) rather than as measure of a how a human being will deal.

One of my students asked yesterday, "what happens if we elect the wrong guy?"

"What happens if we elect the wrong guy?" I said. "Look at the last eight years. That's what happens."

We went to Oakland last year to see Obama speak, outside in front of the courthouse. It was an open public square -- but the place was packed with people of all skin tones, ethnic backgrounds, and ages. It was Saint Patrick's Day -- and a few people wore green shamrock t-shirts that said "O'Bama '08."

I was standing next to some older black women -- seniors who were as giddy as schoolgirls. Strangers, we all leaned on one another as we tried to get up on our tip-toes to get a better look at the man as he spoke in what was basically a bowl surrounded by a crowded flat public square.

It was a standard stump speech. It didn't knock anyone's socks off. But the event -- being there with all those people -- was electrifying. The sense of community that the very idea of Obama inspired -- you know, that ugly "spread the wealth around" stuff that makes otherwise good people do things like help a stranger boost herself up to see history unfold -- was palpable, and intoxicating.

We knew. We all knew.

We were not just there to get a glimpse of a guy for whom we were thinking of voting. We were there to witness history. To take part in it.

That's what America feels like today.

If you take the hollow-pit-in-the-stomach freakout of September 11, 2001, and that feeling of dread, of the country's reins having been grabbed and pulled off the road and in a disastrously completely wrong direction, as the bombs began falling on Baghdad eighteen months later, and wrap them together with the feeling we've had through all the intervening years (those of us who were not loyal Bushist Republicans, anyway) that we were under assault from both al Qaeda (if even) and our own government ...

This is the complete opposite of that, the anti-nine-eleven.

This is the first big, positive, forward moment for our country in my lifetime.

This is the reality moving one mighty click closer to the myth.

Have you noticed that Shepard Fairey's brilliant Obama HOPE poster, above, has become a resonant icon that represents hope for actual political victory in the eternal international struggle against oppression, which was sparked by our own Declaration of Independence? It is the equivalent of Alberto Korda's photo of Che Guevara, or any poster image of Bob Marley -- but it's the President of the United States.

This is revolution. Peaceful, orderly, done at the ballot box. Someone who should by birth be at the bottom of the society is now at its pinnacle -- and so the entire old order is finally, finally overturned.

Have you seen the dancing in the streets in Kenya, for the first Leader of the Free World whose roots are in the Third World? Have you seen the children in classrooms all over the world screaming and cheering and dancing, the Japanese hula dancers singing "Obama, Obama" for the first president from Hawai'i? We're all Americans again.

I have heard a few people express serious doubt about the future, even today. The country is too screwed up, the economy is in too much trouble, this is too much of a mess to clean up, what are we going to do?

(How bizarre it is to suddenly be the not-so-cynical one in a virtual roomful of doubters. As it turns out, that famous Generation X apathy isn't real apathy, but cynicism laid on by a lifetime of Bush-Clinton-Bush, and elections that, year after year after year, somehow wind up all being about Vietnam. That's all over now, kids.)

Yes, we've got a ton of damage to repair.

Yes, there's no one man or woman who can do all that work alone. That's why we hire leaders -- to exhort and encourage the rest of us to bust a move, get going, get to work, let's go.

Now we've got the leader. I don't doubt that we'll bust the necessary moves.

We've been ready since first call.

Jub Jub

2008-11-05T00:07:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney Begin Final Assault on Earth's Atmosphere

2008-10-30T23:44:00.000-07:00

As Exxon Mobil once again announces the largest profits ever in the history of mankind, the Bush Administration begins its final push to kill all environmental laws -- including regulations intended to stave off catastrophic global warming.

In fact, the new Bush anti-regulations are intended to increase carbon dioxide emissions and worsen global warming.

One rule, being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the EPA's estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming. [emphasis added]

A related regulation would ease limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants near national parks.

A third rule would allow increased emissions from oil refineries, chemical factories and other industrial plants with complex manufacturing operations.

Can't say we didn't see this coming.

They're rushing to get it done so that the ink is dry -- so the next President can't undo the oil companies' bidding the way Bush undid all the Clinton Administration's last-minute environmental protections ... on day one.

In case any doubts remained about whom these villains are working for.

The rest of us may be paying attention to the election -- but the profitable War on Terra rolls on.

Can you say "crimes against humanity"?

Okay, Senator McCain, if you're so green, and such a "maverick," and so willing to buck the disastrous environmental policies of George W. Bush, let's see you put a stop to this.

This is the current leader of your party, whose re-election you wholeheartedly endorsed. That makes you responsible for this.

Bush-Style Racist Propaganda, and The Tragedy Of John McCain

2008-10-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

Watch this video, designed to air against Obama's half-hour infomercial tonight:

It uses the now-classic race-coded, fear-elevating, psychology-manipulating propaganda tactics we've come to expect from team Bush.

First, you'll see -- at :06, the words "THE TRUTH" flash, as a still of Obama flashes quickly on the screen -- a light is just behind Obama's head, and it looks like he's wearing Islamic headgear -- it's reminiscent of the images of Obama in Africa that the Clinton campaign disseminated -- except that he's not actually earing a hat. He's also got his arm up at a Third Reich angle -- and he comes off in just that shot, which probably isn't on the screen for a full second, as Elijah Mohammed, the inflammatory founder of the Nation of Islam.

At :12, you will see the words "BARACK OBAMA LACKS THE EXPERIENCE" -- aligned so that it looks like this:

Note how the word "BLACKS" is formed by the "B" in Obama's name, and the word "LACKS" -- so that, quickly flashed -- with a photo of Obama looking dour -- and dark (his lips are practically black with the sepia-tone color treatment they've given the photo) -- it says "BARACK OBAMA BLACKS THE EXPERIENCE."

This is, as we've seen throughout the Bush presidency, sophisticated propaganda. The people making this ad know how the human eye moves through a visual composition.

It borrows tactics from both the famous "Willie Horton" ads, in which the George H.W. Bush campaign used the image of a black man in a revolving door to scare Americans into thinking Michael Dukakis would be soft on crime, as well as Bush-Cheney 2000's RATS ad, which moved the word "DEMOCRATS" off the screen in a way that left the word "RATS" on the screen, for just a moment.

As CNN reported on September 12, 2000,

Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush said Tuesday he was "convinced" an ad placed by the Republican National Committee that flashes the word "RATS" over a Gore prescription drug proposal was not intended to send a subliminal message.

"We don't need to play cute politics. We're going to win this election based upon issues," Bush told reporters in Orlando.

The last eight years, of course, tell a different story.

The next shot in McCain's ad is of what looks like a derelict Mississippi Delta shack, then it cuts to a black-looking man standing in the aisle of a hardware store, and then a poor-looking white woman and her daughter, alone on some run-down steps. Perhaps they have been left by their derelict man.

Added up, the ad appears to be suggesting that if voters elect Barack Obama, Americans will be part of "the black experience" -- of poverty and depression, tarpaper shacks, and single mothers.

In the last shot, the phrase "NOT READY YET" fades in -- one line at a time, and unevenly -- so that the "N" appears soldly-lit, then the R and E below it.

NOT
READY YET

We konw taht hmunas raed slecmarbd wsord as if tyeh are uslcbnmraed. We see waht we ecpxet to see.

And this last bit appears to suggest "N-R" or "N-ER."

Also note that it appears beside another color-treated image of Obama that doesn't quite look like Obama usually looks -- but it does look awfully familiar.

That's because the image has been altered to make Obama look like Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers. In fact, it looks close enough that you might suspect the Bush campaign -- I mean the McCain campaign -- may have actually photoshopped in elements of Atta's face.

And look at how the "T" and the "A" align -- perfectly -- to spell out ATTA, as the eye moves up and down across the text.

Of course, this comes just as another GOP ad this week is actually trying to link Obama to Atta, by suggesting (entirely falsely) that Obama wants to give drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants, and therefore would have abetted the 9/11 attacks by giving Atta a license. (Nevermind that Atta was in the country legally; that he did not need a car for the attacks; or that Obama does not support drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants.)

Marking, of course, the end of a month the McCain camp spent trying to link Obama with terrorism by repeating, over and over, that Obama has a working relationship with "domestic terrorist Bill Ayers" -- to the point where McCain even began to cringe at the monster these tactics unleashed: Americans shouting out "Terrorist!" and "kill him!" at McCain and Palin rallies.

And we're supposed to all believe that this is all just some remarkable coincidence.

I heard a remarkable interview yesterday on Fresh Air, with Robert Draper, who did some investigative reporting for this New York Times Magazine article on the inner workings of the McCain campaign.

Draper explains that McCain has essentially turned his campaign over to Bush operative Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis -- who together decided that McCain would have to act "boldly" at every turn to win over the American people. Those bold moves included suspending the campaign to pull out of a debate with Barack Obama as the financial crisis hit -- and flying back to Washington to "show leadership."

Another bold move, Draper explains, was the pick of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate. This decision, Draper reports, was made not by McCain, but by Schmidt and Davis.

On Sunday, Aug. 24, Schmidt and a few other senior advisers again convened for a general strategy meeting at the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton. McInturff, the pollster, brought somewhat-reassuring new numbers. The Celebrity motif had taken its toll on Obama. It was no longer third and nine, the pollster said - meaning, among other things, that McCain might well be advised to go with a safe pick as his running mate.

Then for a half-hour or so, the group reviewed names that had been bandied about in the past: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (of Minnesota) and Gov. Charlie Crist (of Florida); the former governors Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania) and Mitt Romney (Massachusetts); Senator Joe Lieberman (Connecticut); and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York). From a branding standpoint, they wondered, what message would each of these candidates send about John McCain? McInturff's polling data suggested that none of these candidates brought significantly more to the ticket than any other.

"What about Sarah Palin?" Schmidt asked.

After a moment of silence, Fred Davis, McCain's creative director (and not related to Rick), said, "I did the ads for her gubernatorial campaign." But Davis had never once spoken with Palin, the governor of Alaska. Since the Republican Governors Association had paid for his work, Davis was prohibited by campaign laws from having any contact with the candidate. All Davis knew was that the R.G.A. folks had viewed Palin as a talent to keep an eye on. "She'd certainly be a maverick pick," he concluded.

One interesting aspect of the last 2-3 years, as America has slowly turned against George W. Bush, has been that the conservatives who had spent years as Bush cheerleaders, attacking Bush's critics as madly-partisan sufferers of "Bush Derangement Syndrome", an irrational hatred they considered to be unhinged from the reality of the Great, Bold, Effective President George W. Bush they knew and loved so well, have become Buhs critics themselves ... without ever once acknowledging that the mad liberal Bush-haters were right all along.

There has been a blindness among conservatives to the perceptions of people who are not partisan Republicans.

Someone who has been aligned with Bush and his allies since before 9/11 will never, ever understand what it has felt like -- as actor Richard Dreyfuss tries to explain on the View -- to be under attack both by al Qaeda, and a hostile Bushist-Republican government.

That's why McCain never had any clue that the wonderful sense of relief that had begun to sweep over the land during the primary campaign -- the end of the Bush years in sight, no matter who won the election -- was totally killed by his selection of Sarah Palin as his runnign mate. Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, fascist leanings, power hunger, and pro-oil agenda, was Bush-Cheney redux. Bush league Bush. Or, as John Stewart tried to explain to a blind Ari Fleischer, "dinner theater Bush."

You have read in this space, sadly, for years, about the information war the Bush Administration has waged against the American people.

And here I must reiterate that George Orwell was the most important writer, certainly of the 20th century -- because with Nineteen Eighty-Four, he gave us the map by which to understand the tactics governments of all ideological stripes use to maintain social control over their people.

And here I must also commend writers, teachers, and thinkers across this country, who have spent the Bush years teaching and talking about Nineteen Eighty-Four, so that the next generation, now entering voting age, will recognize these tactics when they see them.

And so one of the positive legacies of these cursed Bush years will have been the political reawakening of the American people.

Schmidt and Davis, also a longtime GOP operative, believed that the most powerful tools in their electoral arsenal were the Rovian tactics that won for Bush in 2000 by convincing South Carolinians that John McCain had secretly fathered an illegitimate black baby, and won for Bush in 2004 by convincing Americans that the Vietnam combat veteran John Kerry was a phony.

Meanwhile, Americans who are not core GOP insiders or Bushists have had an eight-year lesson in how these propaganda tactics work. We have had all-too-effective a lesson in how this type of propaganda masks the corruption and incompetence of bad leadership.

And Bush and his Rovian campaign tactics, waged in lieu of governance, have become American history's greatest example to date of bad leadership.

Now, if but for a brief moment, we will judge our leaders by what they do; by what types of advisors they keep -- with a watchful eye to the next Bush, surrounded by the next Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld; and by how they make decisions based on the advice of those advisors.

Which brings us to the tragedy of John McCain.

McCain's decision-making throughout this campaign has illuminated exactly the weaknesses we now seek to guard against. He has surrounded himself with not just bad advisors, but with Bush advisors, who still see Bush-Rove political tactics, rather than honesty and integrity, as the clearest path to victory. Such advisors, by being inner-circle Bushists, have absolutely no idea what it's been like out in the country as our Justice Department has been turned into a machine designed to steal elections for Republicans; as wars have been timed and waged to tip elections to Republicans; as federal government resources have been used to manufacture political propaganda designed to win elections for Republicans.

They still think we didn't notice. And that includes McCain.

Poor John McCain, who lost to these tactics in 2000. Poor John McCain who, when Kerry asked him in 2004 to be his running mate and mend our broken country in a unity government, instead endorsed four more years of the Bush disaster to ensure his own shot at the White House in 2008. Poor John McCain who, a week from now, if there is justice in this world -- and unless they steal it through voter intimidation; Rovian caging tactics that remove eligible voters from the rolls in Democratic areas; and rigged voting machines -- will have been defeated by these tactics once more.

And rightly so.

For this time, he will have lost because, knowing full well that such tactics were the wrong for the country and wrong for our democracy -- and, literally, wrong morally -- he used them.

He declared "I'd rather lose an election than use a war" and used that as a campaign slogan. He said "I put my country first" and used that as a bludgeon with which to further divide the American people. He trusted the Bush way, that the ends justified the means -- when every nasty turn of the eight-year screw has proven that the means create the ends.

The tragedy of John McCain is that he sold out his central asset, his vaunted principles, to win.

And he'll have to live with that for the rest of his life.

Maverick vs. Rogue

2008-10-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

Here is a remarkable report from CNN.com, in which McCain aides essentially throw their Vice Presidential candidate under the bus.

I'm thinking about how this could be a tactic, and not yet sure how they see it working -- perhaps to energize the folks who like Palin but not McCain, and also energize the folks who like McCain but don't like Palin, so each camp can envision a brighter future without the one they can't stand.

I could see them thinking this would be effective in stanching the flow of blood from conservative writers who have turned against Palin, some of whom are fleeing toward Obama, allowing them to think that Palin will be marginalized in a McCain Administration -- in the Dan Quayle mode. And also effective at re-mobilizing those who want to see Palin usurp power from an aging, sickly President McCain -- at least as his heir apparent in 2016, or even in 2012, as some conservatives seem to think McCain won't run for a second term.

But this quote, from a McCain advisor, is just stunning:

"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone," said this McCain adviser. "She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

"Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom."

On top of the revelations of Palin's full-paycheck shopping spree, the "diva" charge is remarkably, awfully resonant. And here they are, oddly aired on a Saturday, when no one is paying attention.

Well, almost no one.

This looks a lot like attempted suicide for the McCain campaign.

Perhaps McCain, seeing himself going down, wants to ensure that Palin, and her far-right, theocratic ilk -- which he once described, rightly, as "agents of intolerance" -- go down with him, once and for all.

Now that would be putting country first.

McCain On "Socialism"

2008-10-22T17:25:00.000-07:00